


Simra Hishkari - 2 - Red Runes, Black Words

by Sunderlorn



Series: Simra Hishkari: Dunmer of Skyrim [2]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: "It's Alright To Crush On Your Boss When Your Boss Don't Boss You No More" and other Country Songs, A Blossoming Tendency Towards Guileful Greymoral Anti-Heroism, A Demonstration of the Non-Necessity of Lockpicks, A Very Small Siege, Adrenaline: Side-Effects May Include Nausea and Yammering, Adrenaline: Your Mileage May Vary, And You Thought Being A Child Was Bad!, Ashlander, Awful Things and the Editing of Truth, Consumer Guilt, Discourse On and Depiction of the Nordic Judiciary System, Dunmer - Freeform, Empty Huts, Ethically Questionable Biographical Practices, Fullblown Bibliophilia, Gen, Gray Quarter, Headcanon, Heated Bartering, Heavy Drinking, Nord, Original Character(s), Pony-Related Apprehension, Riften, Sword-Related Overexcitement, Training Montage, Vvardenfeels, Windhelm, sad elves, the rift - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-24 10:44:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 84
Words: 175,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4916503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunderlorn/pseuds/Sunderlorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the second century of the 4th Era. Born to ashlander parents and raised in Windhelm's Grey Quarter, Simra Hishkari feels trapped. In the rut of the world he's known for the last eighteen years. In the worsening state of his thoughts, moods, and feelings. Chasing farflung hopes and the chance to choose his own path, he makes a desperate bid for escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Scrub, scour, soap or vinegar — no matter how he tried, the stain held stubborn and wouldn’t fade. Black ink blotted the edge of his left palm like a soot-dark birthmark. It flecked his forearms, speckled his fingertips, lingered in the grooves down the sides of his fingernails.  
  
He once had a spine like a knotted rope, and muscles like matted hair. That was the legacy of the docks. It had left his arms still wiry-strong, and his palms calloused. The aches and cramps faded. His work these days stained him with ink.  
  
Simra might have liked it better if it was his own ink. If he’d spilt and spent and quilled it out for his own reasons, in his own time — his own words. But instead it belonged to the Shattershield Shipping Company. Marked like he was, perhaps he did too.  
  
If the ceiling had been higher, it might’ve felt like a small city, between the shelves and stacks, shadows and alleys. But the warehouse was slung low, a dark stone-cut cellar, a maze. Simra walked careful in the dark, between boxes, crates, bales, taking account.  
  
His arm ached, but the ache was different. His left had a crook-forked pain in it, articulated round the elbow, from holding his scrivboard. His right hand was stiff and clawish from quillwork. A wooden frame that clamped open a ledger, held an inkpot, a stub of candle and its tallowy run-off; the scrivboard was the end-all and utmost of his new work. Compared with the whole living process of dockwork – song, shouting, heaving, hauling – it was strange to be confined to just one task, just one tool.  
  
Between the ledger’s columns, Simra compared orders, prices, stock on arrival. He took note of the cargo lost at sea, or missing due to scarcity. He factored in the customary mark-up and tallied off likely profits, net losses. But most of all, he kept record of what was where. Everything named and numbered, and in its proper place.  
  
Simra reached the end of the final row. He checked over the columns once, then once again. Arrivals, exports, absences — all in check. He blotted off his quill and turned back to walk the paths that led back through the warehouse to the entrance. He went by candlelight, squinting through the gloom.  
  
“No magelight my arse,” he muttered to himself wearily. “‘Oh, we carry a great many goods whose profitability is bound direct to their perishability, elf, I’ll have no witchlight round delicacies of such…well, delicacy!’…What, Torbjorn? ‘Fraid a pinch of witchcraft’ll sour your cheese-wheels and bitter your honey? Fucking primitives…Rather risk setting your whole month-ledger ablaze than get a sneeze of magic in here…”  
  
He kissed his teeth, noisy in the buried dusty quiet of the warehouse. He stowed the scrivboard, detached and shelved the ledger, siphoned off the ink back into its well. Just as he could hear the docks through the warehouse door, he could feel the cold beyond. Simra wrapped his scarf, shrugged on his goatskin mantle, huffed preemptive into the cupped palms of his hands.  
  
“Something you forgot?”  
  
It was Yan, the Shipping Company’s night watchman. Short for a Nord, barrel-shaped, ruddy-faced, with hair like a hedgepig’s prickles on his jaw and his head. He sat where he sat each night, by the door, jouncing an iron-tipped cudgel in the palm of one hand. He’d been asking the same question for long enough now that the suspicion had been all but sucked from it. Now there was only boredom.  
  
“Nah. Lifted everything I meant to, covered my tracks just fine…”  
  
At first Simra had dealt with Yan as he dealt with most Nords in this city. He’d tried to stay a stranger, slipping under his notice, easy as he could. But over time the temptation grew. Yan had a face blank and red as a clay pot, and Simra was bored enough by now that he’d love to see it crack just once.  
  
Yan’s face was impassive as ever. He heaved up out of his chair, hooked the cudgel back onto his belt, and began to pat Simra down.  
  
“D’you have to do this?” Simra groaned through gritted teeth. His body tensed, enduring the search. “Every time?”  
  
“Boss’s orders,” Yan shrugged, went on without looking up.  
  
“’Course it is. Torbjorn keeps his people on-side, doesn’t he? Makes sure even an ugly raggabrash like you gets a grope now and then, right? Just makes you wonder, how’d he know I was your type? Did you put in a special request with the boss or—?”  
  
“You can go.”  
  
Simra kissed his teeth. “So soon? Never would’ve pegged you for a man of moments, Yan…Don’t tell me, ‘this never usually happens!’”  
  
“Go. Home. Simra.” Now it was Yan who spoke through gritted teeth as he turned away to fumble with the door-bolt.  
  
Simra smiled faintly at the Nord’s back. “Till tomorrow then,” he said, and swept out the door onto the dockside.  
  
Song so raucous it was wordless, no telling what language it was in. The lap and lap of water against piers, ship-hulls, moorings and buoys. Wind over the surface of the river, the creaking of wet-logged wood, shipmen’s tramping feet and shouting voices. This was the docks as he knew them. It was how he remembered them, ever since the night he’d bought passage across the river and stole away into the dark. The same Autumn wind blew, now as then.  
  
Another sound came from nearer by. A warmer soft-rumbling sound. Three cats, indifferent coloured in the dark, came sidling from the shadows with tails held in high hookish curves. They were familiar too.  
  
Simra parted his lips. There was a name on the tip of his tongue. Before he could speak it, the night spoke it for him. Gitur. She followed her cats into the brazier light. His mouth parched dry. Something prickled down his spine as the cats muzzed their heads against his knees, pawed their way up his legs with questioning purrs.  
  
“…Shit,” he managed.  
  
“Finish up late these days, don’t you? I’m up past bed-hours just to catch you.” Gitur’s eyebrows twitched up. She didn’t smile but she wasn’t scowling.  
  
That was better than last he’d seen her, when he’d not dared to look at her face for fear of what he’d find. “Can only get started once the dockwork’s all done for the day.” He was glad of something dull to say — words to pour out automatic, reel as his mind might. “I get working around the time I used to be heading home…”  
  
“Comes with a lie-in and all then, this new work of yours?” She snorted. “Shor’s balls, Sim, you’re moving up in the world, ain’t you?”  
  
“If I am, there’s the first I’ve heard of it. Sure as dawn doesn’t pay any better. Same horseshit, different horse.”  
  
Simra had gathered back a little of himself now. Except for the jarring run-or-fight tremor in his knees, he was almost collected. He pulled the mantle tight against the cold. When he began to walk, she followed along the dockfront. Past the drinking-houses and nooks where bedworkers plied their trade. Past heaps of refuse and piles of rope.  
  
“How’d you come by this new stable-stinking job of yours then?”  
  
“Reading and writing. You should try it some time.”  
  
“Don’t play fucking coy with me, right? I know. Shattershield’s usual, Atheron, went off on some errand along the coast. He needed a scriv, and sure enough he saw you eyeing the roster-board, asked ‘You can read that?’, you said yeah you could, and he got you on for a bit as scriv in her stead, being how he’s always one to pinch a penny if he can, thinking ‘now here’s an elf I can pay a pittance and he’ll thank me all the while just for work that don’t break his back’. I know, Sim. People talk — what kind of a Pale-Shod would I be if I didn’t hear? Just tryna have a fucking gab is all. You know, like people do.”  
  
“A gab?” Simra groaned incredulous. “Two years, Gitur. Two years. Nearly to the day, if I remember right, and I usually fucking do. No word – no hide nor hair – since you—…And you just wanna flap gums like nothing’s changed?”  
  
“Now who’s shitting who!” Gitur yawned. “You want the selfsame thing. You missed me, Simra Hishkari. You’re just too pissy on your own pride to admit it. And so’m I, come to think of it. So…like nothing’s changed?”  
  
Simra looked up at her. Her skin looked brazen in the torchlight, glossy-fawn and profuse with freckles. In daylight her hair was brassy too, but firelit, it burned: wild curls, spiralling twists, even tied back into a messy fishtail like it was. He met her eyes for a moment, veered off, down toward the surprise of her mouth. His gaze dropped entirely. He stopped, leant against a closed-up shopfront, and looked out over the black-lapping noise of the river.  
  
“Like nothing’s changed,” he agreed, quiet and chary as defeat.  
  
Gitur led after that, walking at first back the way he would’ve gone, whether alone through the night or accompanied. Up the steps that wound about to the Morayat, through the deep and verberant drydock where the ashlanders settled and tried to keep their memories safe. But when he would have headed up, climbing the Rigs homeward, she kept steering them low.  
  
She talked all the while. About the broadening borders of Pale-Shod territory, down in the gulleybottom. About how old iron had become the dearest jewel in her clan’s rag-and-bone crown as the smithies and foundries uptown melted down and reforged all they could, feeding Windhelm’s new hunger for swordblades and shieldbosses, axe- and arrowheads. About how she’d lost two brothers this past year — one to the Summer Flux, the other when he up and joined the militia.  
  
The Summer just-passed had been a hot one for Windhelm. The floor of the gorge was still fine-grained with dust. Every breath of wind was toothed with stinging grit. Simra fumbled his scarf up to cover his mouth and nose. Gitur didn’t seem to mind. The gorge was quiet this late in the night, except the sounds of cats, the occasional squeal of an unseen pig. Usually Simra would keep his knife close, walking through this kind of dark, this kind of quiet, this kind of place. But he was with Gitur. And hadn’t she said, this was her territory now.  
  
“You still hungry?” she said, scuffing round on one heel to face him.  
  
“Right now?”  
  
“Nah, I’m talking broader than that. You and yours. Your family. Last time, you said—”  
  
“We get by,” Simra said bluntly.  
  
“Mm. We all try, don’t we? I was just…wondering is all.”  
  
“Don’t tell me.” A crawling feeling started somewhere, in the small of Simra’s back. This was familiar. “You’ve got a favour to ask. Only it mightn’t be a very big favour in the end, ‘cos it might be like I’m doing myself a favour too?” His eyebrows raised, arching sharp and furrowing his forehead.  
  
“Something like that.” She smiled a peckish smile. “You’ve stumbled into a unique opportunity, where you’re at right now. You keep track of what’s coming in when, right? For Torbjorn?”  
  
“…Right.”  
  
“And you keep the ledgers balanced, yeah? Incomings, outgoings, tally ‘em all and say what’s where and what’s missing?”  
  
“…Right.”  
  
“Winter’s on its way, Sim. How’d you like a little more coin to get you and yours through it, hey? All you’ve got to do is keep writing in that big thick book of yours…and say some things’ve gone missing…”


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

These days Simra rose at noon, then worked till partway through the night. From grey predawn, breakfast, and a sleepy trudge to the docks with his father, to a foggy overhead sun and the same journey taken alone. The change had been difficult at first. But a body can get used to anything eventually, pushed hard and often enough. No matter what his father said, by now it felt natural.

But Simra was up before work now, before the sun had struck its height. He blinked through the sleep-bleary eyes of a broken habit. His wrapped feet shuffled partway-numb in the sludgy half-settled snow. He was uptown. Drowsing, cold, kept waiting — here he tried to stay wary, knowing full-well he stuck out. That was a habit Soraya had drummed into him. Not one so easily slipped.

The child he’d been looked out now from behind his older eyes, scanning hasty for escape routes, hiding spots, safe crowds and dangerous ones. But the sidestreet was narrow, overhung by tall houses, black Windhelm stone in their first storey, timber from thereon up. Only two ways to run, up the street or down it. But the alley was almost empty. Every house-door was hinged shut. Was that a cause for alarm or comfort?

In his mantle, arms wrapped round himself, eyes darting, Simra stood on the edge of a doorway. Above him a paint-faded sign swung in the listless breeze: a drinking horn and an ear of grain, crossed like swords.

Footsteps. They were heavy-going, shod, unhurried—…

Simra scolded himself for pricking up his urchin’s ears, looking with urchin’s eyes. If anyone was to believe his lies, he’d best start believing his own. He relaxed his shoulders, rubbed some of the sharpness from his eyes. His arms unfolded to hang by his sides.

A man followed the foot-noise. A bearded Nord in the later half of middle-age. A thick coat of green-dyed wool hung an embroidered hem down to his knees, fastened across his chest with three brooches. A tooled belt dangled a sheathed sword low on his left side, its pommel wide and boat-shaped, curved at the fore and aft. His shoulders were caped with lush brown fur and a long-tailed hat flopped its mustard-yellow taper to one side of his face.

“Hail, frola Shattershield.” Simra stepped from the doorway, head bowed a little.

“Simra…” Torbjorn Shattershield paused under the painted sign. “You surprise me yet again.”

“Frola?”

“You read and write our runes. You even know how to flatter a Nord with terms and titles.”

Glancing up, Simra saw a flash of bone-blonde teeth through Torbjorn’s beard. A smile, as he’d thought. Landless, untitled, Torbjorn Shattershield had been made by money. His purchased pride made every bowed head, bent knee, and every half-arsed honorific sweet as honey. Simra knew the feeling in his own way: the headiness of something earnt not expected. Playing dog-humble and foolish with thanks would get him far here.

“Not flattery, frola. Just respect where it’s due. I’m grateful you agreed to speak with me.”

“Come, come. Formalities have their times and places but really, does this look like either?” Torbjorn gestured up to the hanging sign. “I’m cold, and time means money for the both of us. Let’s not waste it, Simra. In.”

He brushed past in a gentle barging of furs, and pushed through the door. Simra was startled into full alert, like jerking awake from a dream. A spark of anger flared up behind his eyes. He’d misjudged Torbjorn. All posturing and presumption, except when it came to business. What was it Ostwulf had always said about underestimating your opponents? Simra followed, ducking into the gloom beyond the door.

For all the smell of tallow candles, the room was mostly shadow, humming with murmured conversation. Down one side ran a longtable, smooth with age and hewn from a planed-off pine-trunk, trailed by a long low bench. On the other there were three smaller clusters of seating, each bordered off from the next by a screen of wicker or stretched hide. The room’s far wall featured a steep rise of stairs and nothing else.

“A tablery,” Torbjorn said, settling into one of the side-booths. “Not a tavern, or a meadhall, or a hostelry. Good for four things, tableries. Ale that doesn’t ask you to think as you drink it, warm stew, coarse bread to soak up the both of them…and quiet talk.”

There were grizzled men and women sat at the low bench, hunched over the longtable. They sopped dark bread in bowls of brown ale. They ate noisily, with a sound sour as the look of their strand-greasy hair, hedgey thatches of beard. But otherwise they sat separate. None of them seemed to be talking, quietly or not.

Simra settled into the booth with Torbjorn. The Nord palmed three coppers onto the tabletop. A steel-haired woman in a stained apron and rouched baggy shift-dress swiped them up without comment, then disappeared up the stairs.

“Jolante there,” Torbjorn thumbed at the retreating woman over his shoulder. “She knows her business. She doesn’t tart things with words, bowing and scraping like a courtier. She strips matters down to the meat, Simra — what one person can do for another, and what the other will give in return.”

Soon the table was laden. Two dark heels of rye bread, crust studded with caraway seeds. A broad stoneware bowl of sharp-smelling stew, aswim with pickled vegetables and short thick sausages. The stew sat for sharing, placed between them. Two small crucibles set beside it: one of sea-salt, fine and glistening like fish-scales; the other of an Eastmarch seasoning, thin flakes of red-black dried meat, spiced and smoked. Jolante poured them each a cup of brown ale.

“Cargo’s been going missing.” Chastened, sipping at the bitter beer, Simra cut to the heart of the matter. “Just bits and pieces here and there since Hearthfire. Imports arriving, but short a little of what’s been ordered. A bushel here, a crate there. Pirates perhaps? Or crooked captains? I—…I don’t know much about shipping. Never been to sea...”

He looked down into his cup. A long finger traced nervous round its rim. With a hunk of bread, he soaked up a little of the stew. There’d been no time for any kind of breakfast. His stomach set upon the food, snarling and clawing. The flavours were welcome: sour and sweet, tuned treacle-bitter from the bread and earthily fruit-rind pungent from the caraway.

“But I know the figures.” Simra swallowed and continued. “The losses are barely worth noting. Nearly nothing outside the usual, at least in the long of things. Press the suppliers, they pay most of the damage by way of apology.”

“Tell me, Simra.” Torbjorn wiped ale and stew from his beard, sat back deep into his seat. “What is it I pay you for?”

“To…” Simra nearly balked. The set of his lips stiffened. For a moment his eyes flashed glassy-hard. Thoughts tumbling, he recovered. “To bother with these things so you don’t have to. I know that. But I had a thought...”

“Quick then.” Torbjorn gruffed through a mouthful of food. The stew was almost gone. His bread had turned to crumbs.

“You can turn a profit here.” Simra spoke quick and stark now. “The ledger just needs to say one thing and leave out another. Say the lost things are losses and the jarl – uh – high king’ll cut chunks off the tariffs you pay. Might even send patrols round the coasts to protect business like yours and the cut he takes from them. But keep on the suppliers. Press them. In the long, take back what’s lost from them — coin, trade, credit, whichever. Only don’t say so when tax-time comes, and you’ll have income or import without tariffs shearing off a penny.”

“You’re suggesting the Shattershield Shipping Company should start smuggling?”

“No.” Simra had to keep himself from kissing his teeth. Another hard habit to break. “I’m asking your permission to be particular about what numbers I write where. You turn loss into profit. All I need in return is another ledger. A blank one, for keeping the figures that aren’t in the other one.”

A crawlish feeling fell down Simra’s spine. The moment hung taut and he was stretching with it, fingers tight-gripped round his cup of ale.

Torbjorn settled into a thinking kind of silence. He pulled off his hat and used it to mop his creased brow. He let out a long smooth sigh and combed both hands through the cloud of his beard.

“I had you wrong, elf.” His voice was weary but sated somehow. “It seems you know your business too. You’ll have what you need. Now see that I get what I want in turn.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

“Thought we’d agreed. You do the legwork, fingerwork, underbelly stuff. You and your people.” Simra peered at a shape in the dock-edge gloom, eyes straining to make it into someone he could scowl at. “I deal with the parchment, sling the ink. Ain’t that what we agreed?”  
  
“S’what we agreed,” the shadow said in Gitur’s voice.  
  
“So tell me why I’m here on the docks with you, ‘bout to do something that feels an awful lot like legwork. Matter of fact, it feels underbelly as all Oblivion, Gitur!”  
  
She kissed her teeth, a mock-up of Quarter Dunmer manners. “I didn’t make you come anywhere. You could be home now, tubbed up in your elf-hole if you wanted. ‘Stead you’re here with me, ‘cos that’s where you brought yourself.”  
  
Simra heard the smirk in her voice.  
  
“Besides,” she carried on, “you’ve fed us hints long enough now. We got good at figuring the patterns. Signs say this catch’ll be a good one. Reckon it’s just polite letting you stick your fingers in the honeypot while it’s at its sweetest, right?”  
  
A prickling heat flared up in Simra’s cheeks. Suddenly he was grateful for the dark. “Right…” he murmured, trying to sound cold, far-off and serious. He tried to ignore the soft feeling in his knees, the hard shy urge behind his eyes. “Say for sake of argument you’ve got me curious. What then?”  
  
“You come larking with us. Get yourself a taste. How’s that sound?”  
  
“Us?”  
  
“Us.”  
  
It was another voice: male, but sharing Gitur’s piebald accent, blunted cadences. One of her brothers, like as not. A burble of quiet laughter broke out across the jetty. Simra tried to count the bellies behind that laugh. Three perhaps, and Gitur, whose voice wasn’t among them.  
  
“As many hands as you can muster then?” Simra said hotly. “To make up for the fact that we’re groping in the fucking dark. Cast your net wide and all that. Crowshit…”  
  
“Maybe,” said one of the men.  
  
“Or maybe we just need more hands for more to haul,” said Gitur. “You catch and carry, you get a cut. How’s that sound?”  
  
“…Larking…” Simra muttered. “I ever mention I’m a shitty swimmer..?”  
  
“What we’re doing, you don’t need to be a good one.”  
  
Somewhere on the docks a bell tolled out. It rang three times for a boat making berth, taking moor, then lingered on as an ironshod humming, discordant through the dark. Here on the edge of the dockside it was easy to forget there were still lives being lived further towards the city. None of the Pale-Shods had brought so much as a candle. Simra knew better than to call up a magelight. Even the moons and stars were clouded half-over. A good mudlark goes by touch and gut-instinct.  
  
Five plodding shapes, they hopped from the jetty and began to wade out.  
  
The riverbank mud sucked at Simra’s bare feet. The night was cold. The mouthing of the mud turned quick to biting. Simra grimaced as his feet grew numb. Deepening, the mud gave way to water, filmed over with a scum of ice, thin as the wings of flies. The numb rose up with the watermark. It felt like walking on stumps, shorter with every step as the riverbed sloped down. The fabric of his trousers had long since turned to lead, the calf-bindings boggy and ill-fit.  
  
“Shor’s balls!” One of the Pale-Shod boys swore. His voice broke into a squeak.  
  
Gitur coughed, strangling the start of a laugh. “Sounds like you’re more worried about your own, Vilten!”  
  
“Only reason you ain’t already froze your arse off’s that there’s so much to fucking freeze, Geet.”  
  
“Same reason your tiny stones froze so soon.”  
  
Simra was numb to the waist now, gritting his teeth against the biting chill. This time of year the White River was wide and shallow, sitting low on its banks. To get where they needed to, he hoped they needn’t go deeper than this. But he hissed as the bed lurched lower once more. Cold water rushed freezing up to the bottom of his ribcage.  
  
“Gods fucking damn!”  
  
“Gods be f–fucking good,” said Gitur from some way off. Her teeth were chattering, dicing the words, trembling them to pieces. “F–f–found one!”  
  
“How many m–m–more?” Simra clattered through his own teeth.  
  
“They’re t–t–tied together!”  
  
Simra gave a gasp of relief, but no words would come after.  
  
“Little help?”  
  
They followed Gitur’s voice, moving in to snag up the ropes, draw in their catch. With trembling hands and cold-clumsy fingers they lunged and struggled their tow of crates and kegs back to the muddy bank. Every feeling that found its way through the numb was stark and unmistakable. Simra felt the full print of a hand against the small of his back. Through the stumpy blankness, he felt something rigid and smooth against the tough sole of one foot. A brief shock of fingers grazed against his hip. He almost yelped.  
  
A roaring cascade of drips sang out their rise from the water. The mud was loud and slow-going, the air sharp and scathish against their wet skin, sodden clothes. The start of sensation came back in burning waves. Simra dragged his share of the coarse-knotted rope back towards the jetty.  
  
Five sets of clattering teeth, five sets of tremoring lungs, breathing shallow and brittle — they flopped onto the wooden waterside like hooked fish. Simra could hear the heart of the docks again, over the brief dark remove that kept them from it. Its torches and braziers flared blinding-warm, after straining to see out amidst the black water. A small gutter of flame sloughed off as he watched, wending sideways and a little toward them.  
  
“A light,” Simra managed to say.  
  
“Not yet,” Gitur panted. “Gotta get these open. Toss the crates and such. Make off. Can’t chance a light. Not till our hands ain’t red anymore.”  
  
A wet-spluttering plaint and the creak of parting wood. Two of the Pale-Shod boys had set to work, prying open the bigger crates with fumbling fingers and flat-bladed iron files. Half-crouching, Simra sat on his heels. The cold had got into his head. It was almost a sound, like the whine that came in on the grey’s hollow wake. Apprehension stirred in his belly, ran lines up his chill-swollen throat. He looked over his shoulder towards the docks-proper. The flame he’d spotted had since gone out.  
  
“I mean,” he started thick and difficult, “thought I saw—!”  
  
Bruise-coloured moonlight blistered before his eyes. Sudden pressure, sudden warmth, broken like an egg over the base of his skull, muffling like a scarf round his neck. Simra dragged in a wisp of breath. No air came, just the hot sickly-sweetness of beer on someone else’s breath. A hard scrap of something jabbed smart against his ribs.  
  
His ears were ringing. The whine, the cold, the rearing searing noise of something coming awake. But he was dragged back, through dirt and dust, down the paths of his mind. A child again, lost or on the edge of being lost, on the Kingsway. His neck wrenched up in a hanged-man’s stretch. No more fuss from you. Quiet now, before I put you somewhere you can holler all you like, hey? Somewhere no-one’ll hear, no matter how loud you are. Where was she? Where was Soraya?  
  
Words, shapes, quivering shadows. No sense came through the fear of it.  
  
Terror broke up through the chill and the smothering warmth. Simra stomped down a foot, threw back his arms, reaching painful behind his head. His palms pressed to metal, hair, warm flesh, damp breath. He wheezed half a word, calling out. No careful spooling this time. When the magic came it was torrential — desperate and reckless, wracked from him.  
  
Hot light broke across the jetty. Simra was crying out. Above that, ragged in his ear, was the animal noise of a grown-man screaming, wailing past point of weeping. Heat blossomed beneath Simra’s hands. A dim glimmer of pain across the panic that had him. He toppled backwards. His spindly body slammed down atop another one, heavy and writhing, both breathless. Clumsy with quickness, Simra scrambled out of the chokehold as it went slack, lurching towards the dim shapes of the others.  
  
“Raya?” he hissed, half-blind, seizing one of the shapes. “Raya, please! Don’t let them—! Don’t—!”  
  
His eyes were wild. His heart had turned to thunder. The man was still screaming but the sound had turned reedy. Simra’s skin was too tight, his skull closing in. His guts were full of rats, writhing tails, snapping teeth. Wet-noise — like Siska, a goat; the knife and the bowl. No more screaming. Someone was saying his name through the black that was growing blacker, that was growing blacker, that was growing black…  
  
Not sleep. A blur that muddied knowing, when knowing would have been too much.  
  
Hands were the next thing he knew. His palms glared with a shrill stiff-skinned pain. It was familiar: the white and lingering sting that comes with a burn just beginning to heal. But there were other hands too. A wrist checked over his brow. Warm rough fingertips combed a slow soothing rhythm through his hair.  
  
Simra forced his eyes open. He’d changed one kind of gloom for another. This was a walled kind, close, more dim than dark, made of soft shadows, soft and careful touches.  
  
“Where..?” he tried to say.  
  
“Safe.”  
  
It was Gitur’s voice, hushed and bare somehow, stripped of mock or pride. Wide and heart-shaped, cheeks high and thickly freckled, eyes a washed-out glassy green. He was looking up into her face.  
  
“How d’you feel?” she asked.  
  
Hard to know, beyond the throb of his hands, the blinding foreground of her fingers in his hair. The right side of his ribcage ached. The back of his head was tender, even against whatever softness cradled it. He was warm, wrapped up. His body was a distant thing, hazy: a far-off heaviness, a roiling uncertainty, coming closer but slow as the tide. How did he feel?  
  
“Strange,” he murmured. “Sick but not urgent-sick. Sort of—…What happened?” A pulse. The uncertainty rushed nearer. His face twitched and a brittle stripe of feeling struck down from temple to brow, from brow to collarbones, like a tendon drawn suddenly tight. “How long since—? I don’t—…”  
  
“Easy. Easy, Simra. You’ll be coming down now, battle-blood draining away. Stay calm or you’ll sick up on me.”  
  
“Battle-blood?” Simra gasped. That was one of Ostwulf’s terms. His head was full of rushing heat. There was sweat, prickling emergent on his forehead. “What the—..? Why are you—? What — don’t — don’t touch me, don’t—!”  
  
A jerk flashed through his body, like a sky split open by lightning. Simra flushed cold, snatched himself up from where he’d lay, curled childish with his head in Gitur’s lap. He thrashed and struggled, cold to his core but too hot among the pelts and ragwork patchwork blankets he was under. He broke free of her, untouched, kneeling and bent double with his searing forehead pressed against the bedding.  
  
“It’s okay, Simra! It’s alright. Right as rain…”  
  
A keening grating moan ribbed up from his chest and caught in the back of his mouth. His eyes squeezed shut, face knotted into a hidden grimace. A dry heave struck through his body, then another, then another. Then nothing but cold, and something almost like hunger, and the dull throb of his hands.  
  
Like when Soraya had plucked him out of the thronging Kingsway and took him to drink down clear air and rooftop quiet. Like when the Barsatims had cut his face, but he’d beaten them, turned them brother on brother. Like when he’d survived the troll. The feeling wasn’t a new one, but use hadn’t blunted its edge. When Ostwulf spoke of the battle-blood in his stories, it was a glorious thing, turning hands and arms to heroism. But the stories never told of the aftershock, the exhaustion. Simra felt bleached to nothing, starved and drained.  
  
Gitur was still nearby, sat close but not touching-close. His senses and his sense of time both ran like chalk in rainfall. Moment to moment he stayed still, first spending all his strength to keep the sick feeling at bay. Then he was still because that was all he could be — everything but stillness was spent.  
  
“You did the right thing,” Gitur said. Her voice was never soft, but now it was open somehow, talking low and steady. “Did it better than most.”  
  
“Killed him, you mean?” Another stripe of cold sick feeling shuddered through him. “Whoever it was…”  
  
“A guard, Sim. An uptown one. Grabbed you by the neck and had us all looking down the blade of his sword, waving it round, saying drop it all and come quiet or he’d stick you.”  
  
“Fuck…” Simra groaned. His stomach buckled and his gullet knotted for swallowing.  
  
“You didn’t kill him.”  
  
“Then what did I..? Then who did..?”  
  
“Just…shit, you made it so that was the only kind thing to do. Only thing that’d shut him up,” Gitur said. And Simra’s head was full of screaming again. “But Vilten did the—…did what he needed to. It was all you could’ve done, Simra. The only thing. He’d have killed you, got all the rest of us…”  
  
“You know what they do to anyone kills a watchman,” Simra mumbled groggily. “Anyone who harbours one. Crow-cages, Gitur…”  
  
“They won’t know!” Gitur was fierce now. Simra’s back clicked and unkinked as he stretched upright again. Her fists were balled, eyes tired but blazing. “What you did to his helmet, his face — couldn’t take off one without tearing off what was left the other. Faceless body, floating downriver? Gear buried under the mud? You’re safe! We’re safe, ‘cos you saved us, Sim — remember that.”  
  
A secret then. So why did it feel like it was trying to break free? It fought in his belly, pounded in his head. There was cold sweat on his skin, like knowing, clawing up through his pores. It was a drone in his head, constant and caustic. But perhaps it was more fear than guilt.  
  
“You earnt this,” Gitur said, voice low and stripped again. Gentle, she pushed something into his lap. “S’what I promised, right? I’m sorry. Sorry we all got more than we’d reckoned on.”  
  
It was a bottle of dark glass. The kind he’d seen corked, wax-sealed, full of wine. But this was almost empty. Something small and steely-sounding rattled inside.  
  
“Stupid…” Simra muttered, smiling weakly down at the bottle. He’d always had trouble looking straight at Gitur. “Got my hopes up thinking it was wine…”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Simra shifted in and out of the grey. It had been that way for nearly a year now. Almost regular but still unpredictable, it swept in, smothered him for days or weeks. Like day and night, the weather, the tides, the only thing sure as its wax was its waning. The grey returned and retreated, measuring out the months.  
  
It came now, and it helped, in its dry cruel way. He’d all but killed a man. And all Simra had of the dead watchman to carry around and haunt himself with, were the reek of his breath, the scrape of a beard on the back of his neck. No name to be ashamed of erasing. No face to phase into his dreams. The grey bled and hollowed all of that, same as everything else.  
  
Simra worked, took his wages, took his cut from Gitur. She asked what had got into him. Every time the answer was the same: he was tired, and that was all. She was the only one who asked.  
  
Why shouldn’t he be happy otherwise? At home they had things they’d never had before. Little modicums of redspice, black pepper, sea-salt, spice-meat smoked and flaked. Redrunsday came. In the cold, the Quarter killed and butchered its pigs, and prepared and sold the meat for days after. And for the first time Simra could remember, they had money to buy more than just scant shares of fatback and black-pudding. That was the change he’d worked towards, and the luxury he’d earnt. Every taste was ashen. The grey took it all.  
  
The Thief slid westward, unswallowing the sunrise. Another year yawned slowly closed. Another Signing Day washed over Simra, and left him another year older. The grey had gotten strong, so thick it choked him. Simra paid an idiot’s price for a bottle of foul homebrew the Three Cornerclub tried to sell as greef. He dragged himself out of the Quarter, along its edge, to sit under the willow tree. The Wheel-House was frozen silent. Simra drank the bottle dry, not knowing why or how long it took. He spent the night with a distant pounding in his head, the sockets of his eyes pressed tight to his hunkered-in knees.  
  
“Please,” he whimpered dull and aimless, over and over. “Please, please…” It was almost a prayer: pleading for something but not knowing what.  
  
The year ended. Morning Star began. The grey split open, thinned and cleared. It left him sharp and fierce and brittle. A knife that’s been honed too much and too often — till its once-straight edge has been worn to a waveform, and it’s likely to snap as to slice and slice well. There was his mother’s temper, there was his father’s focus, and the things that were his, the things that were him. They’d been waiting. Simra knew what he’d been asking for under the willow tree. He’d wanted himself back.  
  
“You’re talking again.” Gitur slurped down a great draught of dark beer. For a moment, a moustache of peach-coloured foam furred her upper lip. Her tongue darted out and slapped it away. “Used to be you were the talkingest elf I’d ever talked to, in your own way. Then you got tired. What happened, Sim? Finally snatched enough beauty-sleep?”  
  
“Something like that. I’m fine now. Good even. Like waking up from a line of shitty dreams, one after the other.”  
  
Simra gave a small secret grin and took a gulp from his own mug. The beer was Gallows Black: a thick-bodied oatmeal and malt brew, half-bitter half currant-sweet, smooth and strong. It left Simra unsure, abrasive somehow in the backmost insides of his cheeks. But the Pin and Patches Cornerclub belonged in all but name to the Pale-Shods, and they’d somehow scraped together a dozen casks of it. For now it was all the club sold. Gitur seemed to enjoy it, and she was the one paying. Simra tried to enjoy it just as much. The astringent ache in his gums was at least balanced by the warmth it fostered in his belly.  
  
But there was a cold core of knowing too. He wasn’t lying, but wasn’t telling the whole truth. That it would come back. That he’d slip back into it, and out of himself again. It was hard enough to admit to himself.  
  
“Doesn’t mean I’m sleeping well though.” He shifted their talk, taking another gulp of beer. It was a longer draught than he’d intended. He grimaced to keep from burping. “Keep thinking about – uh – what happened. Down on the docks.”  
  
Simra glanced about, around him, over his shoulder. The Pin and Patches’ served mostly Grey Quarter Nords like the Pale-Shods who owned it. No telling when it had gone from a taproom or tablery to a cornerclub, but the change was a nod to the changes around it, as the Quarter passed into Dunmer hands. Hushed conversations carried on at the other tables. Loud boasting echoed from others. All in the patchwork patois spoken in the Quarter by Nords and mer alike.  
  
“Thought I was alright with it. Alright as I could be.” He spoke to the tabletop, eyes cast down and fixed. “Now it’s rubbing me the wrong way how alright with it I am, and how I shouldn’t be. Like there’s some rule I’m not following. I should be cut-up, and it’s some sort of sin against something or other how I’m keeping it together. Does that…make sense?”  
  
Gitur was silent for a moment. She reached across the rough wood table. Simra’s arm tensed its workings, ready to go inert or flinch away, sure she was about to lay a hand on his. Instead her palm came to rest just next to where his fingers drummed on the tabletop, stained black with ink, uneasy quick to the time of his thoughts. That was nice. It was enough. It was nice enough. A smile tugged at the stubborn scar tissue of his mouth. He raised his other hand to rub at the lower half of his face, hiding the smile as it formed.  
  
“It makes sense,” she said. “Some sort of sense. Doesn’t mean it’s real or right…Listen. That wasn’t the first man my clan’ve had to sort out. Not the first man I’ve seen sorted either. But it was the first time anyone’s done that for me.”  
  
“…Don’t know what I did it for. Not really. I was scared.”  
  
“I’ve seen what happens when you get angry. Seen what happens when you get scared. Enough to see you’re wasted on this.” She poked with a thumb at the inkstains on his hand. “And all this. The Quarter. Elves getting stamped on so often the fight’s been all but bred out of them. Dunno if you were born with it, Sim, or whether you found it somewhere, but you’ve got fight. Fire. Me, I think it’s weird, but your sister? Reckon she’d be proud.”  
  
There it was: the baited hook that would always catch him heartwise. Pride smoldered in Simra’s chest. He took it home that night, carried it careful, like an ember between cupped hands. In the muffled not-silence of his hammock, with his books and stashed treasures, small hoarded savings, he didn’t think of screams. Those sounds were all he had of the dead watchman. From how he still remembered them, he knew they rang out then strangled down in his dreams, even if the dreams themselves disappeared by morning. He thought of what Soraya would think.  
  
She’d tried to teach him what to think of the uptown watchmen. Men and women who earnt their daily bread and lived their lives by making Dunmer lives hardly worth the living. What did he owe people like that? Resistance where he could resist, patience where he couldn’t. Ostwulf said there was glory even in losing, sometimes. But Soraya always said, only fight where you can win.  
  
Before sleep took him, he wondered how many mer the dead man had locked up, crippled, killed? How many of them innocent, or guilty only of desperation? If there was a debt, he’d paid it. If anyone deserved it. If anyone deserved…  
  
At work there were now two ledgers. The old one, he pored over and scribbled into, checked and rechecked, same as before. But the new one stood by. Simra had told Torbjorn Shattershield it would contain the truth. The truth was that it was empty, and like Simra it was waiting.  
  
Some of his earnings fed and housed his family. But a share of each wage, from the Shattershield Shipping Company or from Gitur, he squirrelled and saved.  
  
Beyond the Kingsway bridge, and the city’s outermost gates, the muster-camp still teemed and grew. Parts sheared away some weeks, but regrew and regrouped the next.  
  
At the docks he listened out for news. He heard the same thing said a dozen different ways, in a dozen different voices. But there were truths to glean from the slant of the words: a proud and reverent hush, or a distant-kept sneer. Ulfric had mustered a fyrd and sent them southward into the Rift, not to raid or wage war, but to recruit, take oaths, gather support. He wanted loyalty, not land. Battles had been fought, but in Eastmarch, no-one was calling it a war — not out loud. And blue banners still flew over the camp beyond the gates, hungry for iron, hungry for warriors. More gathered all the time, and come Spring, more would march.  
  
But Simra was searching for something particular. A look of recognition if he chanced to mention another banner: the Red Vahn. So far there’d been only silence. But Simra was himself again. He was hungry again, chafing again at the walls around him. He was hoping again in small mad instants, bright and potent measures. Change wouldn’t blow in on the wind one day. What had he been doing, if not working to make his own?


	5. Chapter 5

 

 

He stained his hands with another man’s ink, scribed the growth of another man’s money on parchment that would never be his. But even once he’d saved a little, he had a little more coin to spare. Drinking had become another way of carving small victories for himself from the day-by-day defeat of work. No matter the flavour on his tongue or the burn down his throat, it was something he’d won, scraped back for himself from nothing.  
  
Limned and warm, oversweet, Simra’s mouth was marled with taste. An ale that tasted of roast chestnuts, but more the blackened shells than the lush-dusty meat. Another that tasted tooth-jarring cold, like snowberries eaten untempered off the bush. And another and another. Something else that had such a burn at its forefront that the only flavours were remembered on his breath, not felt on the tongue.  
  
He tested round his gums and cheeks, lips twisting anxious. They staggered through the kitchen-warm dark. Setting his feet straight, bracing against a wall, turning where he was meant to. Not falling. His mind was caught up in things normally so natural he’d never known how complicated they were. Now he had to think his feet into motion, will his face away from leering and gurning just to feel the shift of skin over his bones.  
  
It helped drown down the swollen-howling thrum of his heart. Caged up behind his bones, it wanted out. Like rats leaving a ship as it takes on water, risking the swim rather than sink. His eyes were overbrimmed with all the work seeing had become. It helped keep quiet the prowling twist that had taken root below his belly.  
  
Deeper under the Grey Quarter, finding their way, she wrapped him round tunnels and smoke-smelling cellars. She’d drunk as much as he had. But she held it better, and knew this place blind. Like even in the dark, she’d know where her fingertips are, where her toes curl and uncurl.  
  
“Rabbits,” he murmured. His voice had gotten loose, folded full of smoke somehow.  
  
“You fucking what?” she clanged back, half-laughing.  
  
“Always sayin’ how we live up in the Rigs in our ‘elf-holes’. Like you Pale-Shods don’t live in burrows like big fucking rabbits…”  
  
“Rabbits.” Now she really was laughing. A barking brazen jangle of it, ringing off the tunnel walls. “I’ll show you rabbits…”  
  
A hand round his hand, clammy-tight over his knuckles. The ink-stains weren’t something touch could tell. There was nothing to mock there, in the paper-dry palm of his hand, the spindly outsparring of his fingers. At least not in the dark, with their heads so full and near-fully adrift. He didn’t take his hand back. Hers shimmed up, unmeshing their fingers. Her first closed insistent about his wrist. She dragged him staggering, making him match her pace.  
  
Somewhere they stopped. She lit a lamp but the lamp was dim. Guilty hunger or hungry guilt — the twist in him twisted lower. His blood was uneasy. Even with so little to see, his eyes were restless. The scent of this place was gingerish, woollen, freshcut-wooden. His breath was rattling-trapped, unsturdy in the back of his mouth. Too warm. A black and soft-shadowed veloping warm. It was in his head and without, muddying things.  
  
“Yours?”  
  
“Mm?”  
  
“This place.”  
  
“S’where I sleep if that’s what you mean.” Fall of thick hair on his neck. Flinch. “…Shaking like a leaf. Scary, am I?”  
  
Lay down. Looming tide of touch, and words that wouldn’t come. Clatter of teeth. In poems, leaves don’t shake but cling. So why did he? So why?  
  
“S’alright.” Wet, sudden-soft on the outblade of his cheekbone. “Simra?”  
  
Wax. So why were all his outsides stiff as wax unlit while his insides set to melting, churning-hot, burning-tight?  
  
“Don’t have to if you don’t want to?”  
  
“Don’t know.” So what did his skull contain if not words? So why the silence? The yearn of his bones, the longing skin of his scalp, the backs of his hands, his touched-trembling knees. “I don’t know if I…”  
  
“S’alright.”  
  
But weren’t things falling into place? Weren’t things coming to a close? So why not?  
  
“I wanna know…” So where had the smoke gone from his voice? The husk, husked off and shelled. Fingertips overruled the bones that collared his swanlined neck. Words trapped in the half-moon between those bones.  
  
“…if this is what I..?”  
  
“…want..?”  
  
“Years, you dolt.”  
  
Tremor. Timbre through his body, like the lilt and tremble of songs about lovers and graves and flowers that don’t wilt, remembered, written down somewhere far-off so as not to to forget. She shared her weight over him.  
  
“Thought it was all joking. Trying to make me blush. Look stupider. Why would you..? What’s there to..?”  
  
So why?  
  
“Fucked if I know.”  
  
Then what?  
  
“I don’t wanna…”  
  
“…hurt me..?” Laughter, skin, the glide of teeth flat against his throat. Timbre. “You’re not all that, Sim. Reckon I can weather you just fine…”  
  
That wasn’t what he’d meant.  
  
“…sorry.”  
  
“The fuck for?”  
  
Press and taste. Breath catching, making sounds that weren’t quite voiced. A shift and tremble of shadows and sweat. Hands, not knowing where they can and can’t touch. The whole of his flesh was feverish, so why were his feet so cold?  
  
With a splitting skull-ache, Simra left the Pale-Shod burrows. He found his vague way out by chance, not memory. The alley he stumbled out into was a gutter of shade on a sundrenched day. Simra blinked, raising a hand to shield his eyes, wincing against the growing pain behind his brow.  
  
The strength had gone from his legs. He worried his way down the gulleybottom-proper, edged off towards Northslope. Best avoided at the best of times, but Simra knew a well with decent water that way, and braving the eyes of uptown watchmen seemed better than staying thirsty. His throat was dry and swollen. He reached the well and raised the bucket time and time again, backing off as impatient mer lined up with jugs and bottles behind him, then edging back into line, drinking till his belly was full as if he’d eaten a meal.  
  
This was the time he’d be heading to the docks, any other day before now. Instead he struggled sluggishly up the ladders and clambers of the Rigs, towards Chiming Row and home. Not one more day, not one more penstroke. He was done working for Torbjorn Shattershield; quit of the whole trod-down business. That was what they’d been celebrating. The two of them. Simra dropped into his hammock, curled in on his side, tried and failed not to think about that.  
  
Past the rainfall taste of the Northslope well’s water. Past the sour linger of ale and clear scourging spirits. Past the glower of his headache, the thirst that was already returning, there were the other things: hazed and shardy memories, far-off strong on his tongue. A ball of guilt turned slow and growing in his belly. It was leaden, lost, hot with half-felt shame.  
  
Across from the nook where his hammock was strung, Simra felt the wedding-jacket hung up where Soraya used to sleep. It was watching him. He could feel it in the same stupid part of him that counted magpies for luck, and walked round ladders rather than under them — not rational, but unwilling to say outright what’s real and unreal. It spoke to the plumb-weight of guilt in his gut. He was just like the rest of them. Just as bad.  
  
He tried to sleep off the pain in his head. His dreams were of the noises a person’s voice can make without ever forming clear into words. He dreamt of a man’s screams as the fat, the hair, the skin rendered hot from his face. He dreamt of Gitur – “no need to be so careful, right?; see?; like this; till I don’t need to tell you it’s alright anymore…” – gone come morning, before he’d even woke.  
  
The guilt wasn’t gone after that. It still weighed heavy, but had fallen silent. It was best to keep doing. He’d set things in motion and they wouldn’t stop for him. He’d laid plans but left a wake of trouble — no knowing when that would catch him up, or how long this chance might last.  
  
He put on his mantle, took his gather-sack, slung and half-filled it. In went the two ragpaper books Soraya had once given him, a pouch-tied rag of accumulated coin, and the copper snake-bracelet. He took the ledger from where he’d stowed it. Nearly heavy, heady-feeling in the way only stolen things are, it was blank save for the first page. Careful and particular, he tore out that leaf, folded it, set it on his hammock. Then the ledger joined the other books, swallowed into the gather-sack. For the first time in months, he pulled and tied on his boots.  
  
In the common-chamber of their warren, his mother was stirring something foul-smelling, muddy-grey with a texture like glue. He drew quiet towards the hearth-pit, where she sat tending the rendering kettle.  
  
“Alchemy?” he asked. He flattened a quaver from his voice. It was a kind of pretending that hurt, stretching him painful.  
  
“Not dinner,” she said, with the oft-trodden rhythm of a well-practised joke, not funny anymore so much as comfortable. “That’s for certain.”  
  
“Early in the year for crabshell ash and gull quills, isn’t it?”  
  
“It might be, if that’s what it was. But it isn’t, so it’s not.”  
  
She wanted him to figure it out by scent, by sight. It was another one of her teaching-games. But he wasn’t a child anymore. No need to learn and no time to play.  
  
“I’m going for a walk,” he said. The quiver came back. He crushed it same as before. “I’ll be gone for a bit. No need to wait for me, just—…eat whenever da’s back.”  
  
“He’ll have to wait a while yet. This is a long brew.”  
  
Standing over the guest’s glyph’s, near the threshold of his home, he glanced back at his mother. She sat by the fire, cross-legged, low and well-rooted, weeping-willow hair hanging down her back and about her face. It was how he’d always remembered her before now. He could fix the image in his head, find it again, like walking thoughtless down an old familiar path. And that was good, wasn’t it? Whether it was enough — that was less sure.  
  
“Mam?” Simra called from the doorway. She looked up. There was a question in her face, a glimmer of realisation. His voice had cracked and nothing would fill the breach. He nodded weakly and tried to smile.  
  
The threshold framed him. A grown-out halo of chalk-white hair edged round his face and snagged down his forehead, cornered into his amber-red eyes, straight but untame. Perhaps he’d grown into his face. It wasn’t sharper but the contours had hardened, grown clearer, more bold — like an artist learning to set down the same features, first with force of habit, then with confidence and style. The marks his mother had scarred into his skin showed pale and softly raised on his cheek and near his eye. The rest was tallish body, scarecrow limbs, hip-cocked stance and narrow slope-lined shoulders. Maybe that was an image for her to fix.  
  
Not another word to say. Simra slipped out into the gathering dark. There was a thickness in his throat he had to swallow down as he walked the way he’d come a hundred times before. Through the quiet spinner’s workshops and knitting circles, the day’s end textile dust beginning to settle. Around the waste-pit, then down the cramped crawl-tunnel with a palmful of magelight to see by. Then out towards the willow where it overlooked the docks.  
  
He stood between the tree-roots and looked back towards the city’s black stone wall. Three stones up from the bottom, straight ahead of him, he loosened a chittel of mortar, and reached into the cranny it left, arm buried up to the shoulder. He felt cloth. His hand came out holding a wrapped bundle. With the shape wedged firm between the roots, he stamped down on it, opened the wrappings and fished through the shards of bottle-green glass. It was the rattling thing Gitur had given him, told him he’d earnt. And there was what rattled inside.  
  
A ring, not round-sided but roughly hexagonal, made from tarnished pewter and etched around with a crude rune on each edge. It was warm to the touch. Looking through it, the air seemed to shiver, like the heat-haze that hovered over Windhelm’s roof-slates in Summer.  
  
“Enchanted,” he murmured to himself, cracking an eager grin. There was magic etched into the metal. He slipped it onto his left hand.  
  
Lights moved out on the water. Ships and boats still came and went. Distant bells tolled, sounded out and faded. Further off there were watchfires and torches, pinpricked in the night like stars to point out the end of the Kingsway bridge. A sea of lights beckoned beyond. That was the muster-camp.  
  
He hurried now, back into the Grey Quarter and through the Rigs. He’d made his preparations, readied what he’d need. There were four more of Soraya’s secret places to visit before he went uptown and towards the Kingsway.  
  
He’d heard it, clear as rumour can be. Among the lights of the muster-camp there was a new fire, tents pitched under a new banner: a grubby white flag, stitched with a single red rune. And he’d been waiting.

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

The willow-tree was the first of five. It was best to keep busy, close to thoughtless as he could be. That night Simra groped the pewter ring from the cache he’d crannied into the city’s outer wall, then hurried down to the gulley floor. He pried open a sealed well-shaft, hauled up the bucket by its hidden ropes. The bucket nestled a dark bronze kettle, its potbelly crammed with blackish pinesmoked tea, chews to soothe pain, a grubby silver shilling.  
  
After that he climbed again, into an attic impossible to get into except through a rent in the roof. In the dust and the damp he uncovered a bound-up bedroll from inside a waxed raincloth. In the tannery-reek of Crucible, at the top of the Quarter, he turned a roofslate to tease out another small cache of coin. Factor-dens, workshops for low kinds of alchemy, tanneries — their roofs were snowless, muggy-warm from beneath. Simra dashed across the tops of Crucible quick as he could till the tiles turned cold and skinned with snow again. That marked the change: he’d swapped the Quarter for the edges of uptown, as night slid into day.  
  
Dawn built to breaking point under the lip of the eastern horizon. Morning was still a ways off but the day’s first light was well on its way. Glimmers of grey had snuck into the sky. Soon they’d be gleaming on the rooftiles too, the stilled blades of the Wheel-House, the scanty blanket of Morning Star snow that muffled the city.  
  
“Best hurry,” Simra muttered to himself. “Getting late.”  
  
But this was his last stop. Overhung by two in-leaning roofs, where the Quarter ended and uptown began, this was the first of her hiding-places Soraya had ever shown him. He dug up a section of damp thatch, pawed through a wadding of rags and straw. Elbow-deep his fingertips found leather. Like a midwife, two-handed, he grasped and dragged out his prize.  
  
It was a satchel, about as wide across as the length of his forearm. The leather outside and its folio shape made him think of a hefty book. A tome. And that made him happy just looking at it. Two faces and a spine, cut from brown leather, it was stiff but lived-in long enough to bear some flex. Where a book would have leaves the satchel had a large pocket of thick-woven hard-wearing cloth. It stitched to one of the covers as backing while the other flapped over to protect it. A leather strap looped out from the two ends of its spine, to wear over the shoulder.  
  
It had been a gift to himself. At a fleamarket in Saltcask Corner, amongst the sellers of dried fish, the street-cooks churning out fried saltfish dumplings, Simra bought it weeks back from an old Dunmer hawking wares off a scrap-strewn rug. At nearly a dozen pence in copper the price had been a bitter one, almost a shilling. He’d let his interest show in his eyes. And that was the same in haggling as throwing his arms wide, tilting his chin to lay bare his throat might’ve been in a knife-fight. But the bag was a pretty thing — practical, durable, his. It was almost worth the cost and certainly worth keeping.  
  
Simra fed some of the weight from his gathersack into the satchel’s pocket. The cheapest of his coin-purses, filled with copper, for small spending or playing as a decoy. The little black whetstone, two wooden whittled pens, a paper envelope of sootblack to mix into ink. The stolen ledger. They were the things he might want to grab quick and easy, ready at his side without rooting through the bigger sack hung over his shoulder. He slung both bags’ straps, looked uneasy eastward, then hurried on.  
  
He scampered over a support staved between two teetering houses, hugged down a wooden buttress skinning his knees and elbows. Down one last long-pitched roofbeam, and Simra dropped into an uptown alleyway. His bootsoles smacked wet against the slush and grey snow.  
  
“Fuck all points for grace,” he said, stretching upward, shaking out his impact-aching legs. “Practically graceless. Or gracelessly practical?”  
  
He could live with the latter. The talk helped settle his nerves, spooling out what was inside, letting him listen to it, ignore the rest. He shouldered through streets of leathertoolers, carpenters, furriers. Eventually he reached the Kingsway.  
  
He’d seen it busier, thronging-tight with travellers and traders. But even in the dawning-light, worn-out night-guards and tired-eyed new ones walked between the carters and stallholders, changing shifts like sleepwalkers in the part-empty Kingsway. They talked amongst themselves, settled in to doze or watch from corners and platforms, elbows propped on their tall blue shields, chins propped on their bracers.  
  
There were still no crowds to hide in. Simra went in plain sight, head down, stride even. It wasn’t hard to look like someone with somewhere to be — not when it was close to the truth. But he stood out. He made it to the inner gate before a spearshaft blocked his path.  
  
“Hold.” The voice was bored and habitual, no force to it and no sneer. “What business d’you have beyond the walls?”  
  
Simra looked up. The watchwoman was tall, edging towards hard-lined middle-age. She wore a hooded shawl under the tall taper of her helmet, face framed by its hanging leather side-flaps. Her shield was painted a familiar shade of blue. For the first time Simra spoke to a Nord and hoped they proved a patriot.  
  
“Heading to the muster-camp, frala.” He bobbed his head in a small bow. He made his speaking simpler, made it clear his accent was an attempt at hers.  
  
“I was there not yesterday.” The spear stayed motionless, barred across the postern-gate. “Looked like they had potwashers aplenty. And more than enough jugglers, scrap-hawkers, and fire-breathers too. You’re Grey Quarter, hey? Best you run home.”  
  
She’d not called him ‘elf’ yet, but there was something tacked onto everything she said: a pause that might as well have leered the word. Simra bit back a snarl, tried to keep shy and humble.  
  
“Don’t mean to be any trouble, frala. I just—…I want to enlist is all.”  
  
“Don’t see any weapons on you. No armour.”  
  
She knew full-well she’d be using sterner words if she did, levelling her spear and readying her shield. The hypocrisy of it made him want to spit.  
  
“I know, frala. Won’t make a eorling, I know that. But there must still be something I can do to serve my king.”  
  
“Get on then.” Her face softened slightly below the band of her helmet. “Serve well.”  
  
The spear rose, unblocking the way. Simra ducked past, head-bowed, gushing his thanks as he stepped off onto the bridge.  
  
“If I see you skulking back here without a scrap of Stormcloak blue to show..!”  
  
The wind stole her parting words. Simra was already too far-off, feeling the wrapped weight of the spearhead-dagger inside his tunic, thanking his stars she’d not searched him and found it.  
  
Across the bridge Simra hugged his mantle tight against the breeze. It worried at the outgrown wilds of his hair, blustered chill on his face. His skin crawled, brow to cheek, neck to chest and shoulders, out and downward. The night had been long. Simra wished he’d had time to find Ostwulf in the alleys of the Quarter floor — to ask for some last scrap of wisdom maybe, or just to fish for his approval. He wished he’d had time to bathe.  
  
The bridge was growing busier as morning drew on. The outer gates were thrown open wide. If any of the guards saw Simra amongst the tides of travellers, traders, soldiers and mercenaries, they didn’t care enough to stop him. That was another reason to be thankful.  
  
In First Seed the muster-camp had been like another small city, budding parasitic from Windhelm’s outskirts. Now it was more like a forest of tents and banners, cobbled-up shelters, spreading tether-rope roots in tangles over each other. The paths were complicated, the clearings sparse and half-hidden till you stumbled into one. But in the morning it was mostly quiet except for stirrings behind tentcloth, the trudge and groan of sick-looking strangers, the occasional cry of a rooster.  
  
More likely anyone Simra saw moving had been up since the night before. That would explain the haggard faces, colourless cheeks, their staggering tread. Yesterday’s hangover had slipped away but he was tired now, hungry enough that his body had traded one kind of gripe for another. Probably he looked no better than the others: another vagabond in a camp run ragged with age.  
  
On the camp’s edges he found a slack-mouthed Nord boy tending a mudbrick oven. For half a copper penny, Simra bought a watercrust pastry to silence his growling belly. Its shape was irregular, like a crooked half-moon, tied off at its corners and filled with a steaming-hot crush of honeyed chestnuts. A wicker basket of nuts sat nearby, shells still intact and glossy. As Simra ate, the boy took a skillet of chestnuts from his oven and set it down to cool on the snow.  
  
“My hands don’t burn easy,” said Simra between mouthfuls.  
  
“Can see that,” said the boy as Simra knuckled hungrily into the steaming pastry-crust.  
  
“D’you know your way round the camp?”  
  
“Fine enough…”  
  
“Tell me where to find someone and I reckon I could shell those for you quick as blinking.” Simra nodded at the skillet, hissing against the snow, piled with blackened roasted nuts.  
  
“Do it ‘fore I’ve fixed the next crust, I’ll give you that an’ another a them for nothing.”  
  
Simra’s first pastry was already gone. His stomach growled, stirring up into a hunger that was just getting started. “Deal,” he said.  
  
In silence, the boy boiled water and melted in lard, mixed in flour with practised hands. Simra brought out his spearhead and set to work piercing the nut-hulls, peeling the hot shells, tossing them aside and the meat of the chestnuts into a basin nearby. They finished almost at the same time.  
  
The boy didn’t say who’d won their race. He just asked what Simra wanted to know, and shovelled out another pastry from the oven’s glowing insides.  
  
“Wanna know where I’d find a banner…” Simra scuffed in the snow with the toe of one boot, scraping out lines in black dirt against the grubby white slurry. The mark he draw was like a crow’s foot – ᛉ – a crooked kind of cross used in Skyrim’s half-runed alphabet, and in accounts of coin as the scriv-sign for a Nordic copper penny. “Like that. That rune, a vahn, but red probably, on a white background.”  
  
“Seen it, yeah. Or some like it. May’ve been white once. Now though? Better off lookin’ for grey.”  
  
The boy gave directions, through the teeming cramp of tents, pavilions and half-permanent shelters. Simra thanked him and set off across the camp in the hazed morning light, searching for the banner of the Red Vahn.


	7. Chapter 7

The morning was broad and deep, open-skied with a cloudy-faced sun overhead. Morning Star was too soon for hot weather but the air was turgid and muggy-thick.  
  
Simra felt unwashed, wax-skinned. The beginnings of sweat stippled his brow and itched at the small of his back. The first drops never came, but the itch remained.  
  
Underfoot the night-snows had long since turned to slush. The ground bogged muddy and difficult, caking Simra’s boots, flecking his calfwraps. And the muster-camp came alive at a trudging pace. Tents and shelters staggered irregular, leaning together like drunks. Paths twisted between them, tangled as tree-roots, linking boot-cratered clearings and wheel-trenched causeways. Weary-faced folk trudged through the morning, between tents, flags, and steepled bundles of spears.  
  
Banners and pennants lurched up from the dirt. Snaggled groupings of tents packed in around them. This was where he’d find the free-companies — the boy had told him as much. Simra turned left at a banner of bearskin and tinkling bells. Left again at a carved boar’s head mounted on a pike. He walked till he found one more snare of tents, close round around one more grubby banner hanging lifeless on a crooked pole, jutting up from a sea of black mud.  
  
A half-circle of carts and wicker screens. Tent-walls and tent-doorways thronged together like dogs heaped for warmth. Most were small, not much more than a canopy over the head of a single sleeper. Some were pitched cones or slope-roofed like little houses.  
  
A figure sat on a three-legged stool by a steaming cauldron. A salt-and-pepper beard forked out from under a baggy backdraping hat with a frontward slouching brim. Brown arms reached out from the sleeves of a long shapeless tan coat, stirring the pot steady and slow.  
  
A woman with close cropped grey hair propped herself up against a sword nearly as long as she was tall outside her tent’s doorflap. Teetering, she struggled one foot then the next into a pair of tall half-leather boots, and stretched upward towards the sulking sun.  
  
Stripped to a loin-cloth, an Argonian crouched, caking mud onto its scaly hide. Half its body was already blackened with the stuff. When the coating was dried and cracking, the Argonian dusted it off. Underneath, the scales were smooth and glossy in a way they hadn’t been before.  
  
Simra struck out towards the man by the cauldron, sinking nearly to the ankle with every step. The longer his stride, the less he’d have to deal with the mud. He walked at a lope, calling out when he got close.  
  
“Morning!”  
  
The man turned round to see him. Under the slouch of his hat’s brim and the long drape of its back, his face was dark and lined. His bright hard stare was a shock and a question.  
  
“Was hoping you’d be able to tell me something,” Simra said.  
  
No response except the stare. The man carried on his stirring.  
  
“What’ve you got cooking there?” Simra craned his neck to see into the pot. Some kind of broth seethed inside, the same light-brown as ale.  
  
“Breakfast.” The man’s accent was unfamiliar, rough and insistent on its consonants. He turned back to the broth, closing the conversation final as the shutting snap of a book-spine.  
  
“Wait,” said Simra, “that wasn’t what I wanted to know!”  
  
“Then why did you ask?” The man didn’t look up.  
  
“Conversation maybe? Talking. You know, like people do?” A glint of frustration flared up under Simra’s tongue. “You rather I just come up and scour you for what I wanna know? Like a fucking handbill-board?”  
  
The man rose from his stool. He towered a head taller than Simra and broader by far in the shoulders, looming over him like a stormcloud. Simra suppressed a flinch, meeting his glower, trying to keep his own face hard and defiant. His knees juddered, ready to bolt. If this bearded hillock tried anything with that ladle—…  
  
“I was shitting you,” the man said clearly. Simra glimpsed a flash of white teeth through his forked beard. It might’ve been a smile. “Relax. No need to stain your breeches.”  
  
“Blight and blood-vengeance…” Simra’s legs went weak with relief. As the anger drained, the fear beneath it rushed in to fill the lack. It paled his face, choked his throat, then flowed off the same way. “You pull that act on every stranger you meet?”  
  
“The ‘stern and silent Ra’gada, demanding of respect on pain of death’ act?” The Redguard laughed, low and half-musical, as he sank back down onto his stool. “Works wonders on dung-skulls who swagger up, treat me like I’m ‘just the cook’, doesn’t it? Thank your starts I’m the forgiving sort.”  
  
Simra gave a nervous laugh, tight and bitter.  
  
“What did you want to know?” the cook asked.  
  
“If you and the rest of this camp are with the Red Vahn.”  
  
A nod. Simra continued.  
  
“Then where’d I find your boss?”  
  
“The boss?” said the Redguard, brows raised. “In the tent by the banner but—”  
  
Simra was already walking away.  
  
A largish tent of faded red canvas and leather patches was pitched behind the grubby standard. Simra paused in front of its crooked pole, reached out to touch the cloth. It was coarse between his fingers, almost colourless, frayed at the edges and threadbare throughout. But folded in its center a forked red rune had been stitched. Beyond it the door-flap draped closed.  
  
For a moment Simra had thought about knocking. “Stupid,” he muttered, scolding himself. The sleepless hours were catching him up, but here was the end of that long-waking road and the start of something else. Perhaps she was expecting him, like he’d been expecting her. He bent to raise the flap and walked through.  
  
It wasn’t Siska.  
  
A man sat inside, hunched over a folding table. His dark hair was swept back in a short mane of loose oiled curls, scourged with streaks of grey. Dark-olive skinned and mid-height, his build was compact and confident in its dimensions, regimented in its movements. He looked up and stuck Simra with a hard patient glance.  
  
“You are..?”  
  
Simra’s jaw worked and his tongue writhed behind his closed teeth. But words failed him. Where was she?  
  
“Not someone who knows how things are done here, clearly.” The man behind the table answered his own question. “Here, you call out for permission before entering this tent. Now, find your manners and tell me who you are and why you’re under my canvas or I’ll throw you out myself.”  
  
“I—…You’re not…her.”  
  
“Not..?” The seated man raised his brows. The corners of his mouth turned up in bland amusement. “Who?”  
  
“Siska!” Simra snapped.  
  
The frustration was back now. The same kind of self-righteous anger that comes with being tricked, it glared inward and outward at once. Anger at himself for how foolish he’d been. Anger at this man for letting him know it, laughing at him with his eyes.  
  
“She told me she’d be starting a company under the banner of the Red Vahn.” Simra scowled, talking quick and cold. He was talking with his hands now as much as his voice, one fist balled by his side, the other pointed accusing. “She told me it’d come to Windhelm one day. I’d find the banner, know it was hers, join up. Things would be—…I would be—”  
  
“A recruit,” the man cut in. “You’re looking to join the Vahn. A simple answer, so why was it so hard to say?”  
  
“What—? No!” Simra threw up his hands. His face contorted, confused or angry. “I’m not answering or asking another fucking question. Not till you tell me where Siska is, and why you’re sitting where she’s meant to be. The banner, the name, the command of ‘em both — you stole at least one of ‘em so start telling me which!”  
  
The dark-haired man propped his elbows on the desk and raftered his thin fingers together. He drew in a long shallow breath. By his accent he was foreign. Simra didn’t recognise where he was from but sensed book-learning on his voice, the confidence of decent breeding or years of talking down at others. Soraya had called it the Prick’s Ease.  
  
“Gods give me strength,” the man murmured, rubbing at one eye with a knuckle. “There was a time I’d have had you flogged for saying half what you just did. There was a time after that I might’ve admired your spark. But this morning? This morning I’m tired.”  
  
The amusement had gone from his face and left it drawn, slack and worn by half a lifetime’s worth of years. Simra’s fists unballed, dropping to his sides, lead-heavy as the man continued:  
  
“I stole nothing from Siska. She laid the foundations for the Red Vahn, built it from the ground up. But she’s no commander, and she’s the first to admit it. And that’s what the Vahn needed as soon as it had more than a dozen fighters to its roster. There was a vote and I claimed the majority. Think of our company as a boat, if you like. Is the one who built it by necessity the best captain it could have? No. The best captain is whoever has the experience and resolve to keep it afloat and pilot it toward profit.”  
  
“Right…” Simra’s tongue flickered out over his dry lips. “So where’s Siska?”  
  
“Alive and well, with a share in the Vahn like any other contractor.” The man’s smile was a clipped and weary thing, thin and close-lipped. “If it helps you look a little less like you just found a weevil in your wine, she cast her ballot in my favour.”  
  
“Say I sign on,” said Simra. “Get a contract. Is it to the Vahn or to you?”  
  
“All contracts are to the banner,” said the commander, acid-patient, like he was explaining to a spoilt child for the sixth time why they can’t live only on cake. “My own included.”  
  
Simra chewed the idea over in his mind. The anger had ebbed, leaving an ember of embarrassment. He hadn’t come this far to fight for Siska. He’d wanted to fight with her and for himself. With the surprise gone, his reasons remained. Change.  
  
“I want in,” he said.  
  
“Why?”  
  
The question caught Simra off-guard. His mind reeled for a moment, then pounced back to recover the lost ground, lost footing.  
  
“I’m poor,” he said. “I was born poor, raised poor. My family are poor. If I believed in destiny I reckon I’d think I was fated to die poor, across that fucking river, in the same cave my mam birthed me into. I worked on the docks for a bit, like my father. And I kept hearing this song the dockers and sailors and bedworkers sang. ‘Say what you will of silver and gold,’ it said. ‘Can’t buy a friend when you’re lonely, or your youth when you’re old,’ it said. True maybe, but mostly it’s the kind of crowshit that rich pricks say to feel righteous, and that priests tell poor fuckers to fool themselves with so they can’t see how deep and dark and shit-smelling the hole they’re in really is. Know what I reckon? Say what you will of silver and gold — they won’t buy you happiness but they can sure as sunrise pay off a lifetime of misery! And that’s what the Grey Quarter is. I want out. I want my family out. Silver and gold can do that, and with the Vahn…I reckon there’s coin to be made.”  
  
Simra stopped abrupt. He was breathless. Colour burnt hot in his cheeks. He was wary of himself again, nervous and shuffling, boot to boot. He raised a shaking hand to push the hair back out of his eyes.  
  
“Well said.” The commander tapped two fingers against the belly of his other palm in silent applause. “And for a moment there I was worried you were going to say ‘for fame, glory, and the honour of my ancestors!’ Your reasoning has a place under the Red Vahn, that’s certain. Less sure is whether you do.”  
  
Simra kissed his teeth. “S’pose you’ve got some way for sign-ons to prove themselves, right?” He crossed his arms over his chest and met the commander’s gaze. “But you said it yourself, I don’t know how things’re done here. So tell me.”  
  
“Correct,” the commander nodded. “You show you’re worth a contract and a share by proving you’re a sounder investment than another hopeful.”  
  
“Right…” The skin bristled down the back of Simra’s neck. He wasn’t certain what the other man had in mind for the proving but he had the beginnings of an idea. “You got someone else who fancies they’re worth it? Or do I have to wait?”  
  
“We do. You’ll be waiting till evening — no longer.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Course you won’t be going at it to the death!” Siska gave a cackling laugh, slapping her knees. “No edges, not even steel. Shit!” She shook her head, ratty-brown hair falling into her grinning face.

Simra lowered his eyes, looking down into his bowl of soup. Split peas and barley cooked together in a broth made from goat-bones, bitter-mellow with what Simra reckoned to be dried lemon-rind.

He’d gotten used to Siska’s jabs and crowing long ago. A few days ago he might even have told himself that he’d missed it. Now he was just determined to suffer through it. And he supposed that was a return to old times.

She’d found him in the camp’s muddy clearing, staggering from her tent. There’d been no words of welcome or surprise — nothing about how good it was to see him. “Well, you came!” was all she said. But since then she hadn’t stopped grinning her wide grin full of sharp black teeth, except to spit, then grin again. She grabbed hold of his satchel-strap and dragged him, first to find the other outliers, then to find breakfast.

And breakfast with the Red Vahn seemed to last from late-morning till the cook-pot was empty. By now the sun had passed through noon and begun to head west. Across the clearing, bleary-eyed mercenaries still lined up and jostled, waiting for their turn at the cauldron-side. The Redguard cook doled out soup by the ladle, complaining all the while about the miracles he could’ve worked if he’d only had two more ingredients.

Simra finished his bowlful and licked his lips clean. It was no miracle but it wasn’t half bad.

“So it’s — what?” said Simra. “Boots and fist and tooth and nail? Sticks?”

“Not quite,” said Siska, licking her own bowl clean. “Near enough though.”

“They’re not quite sticks,” said Kjeld, looking up from a half-formed whittled something held in his hands. “But calling them wooden swords would be a few steps too generous.”

“Any rules I should know about?” asked Simra, trying to put some bravery into his voice, or at least a scrap of careless poise.

“Not much as needs explaining,” said Siska. She fumbled another black chew into her mouth and began to work her jaw. “End up on the floor, or out cold, or begging off the next bruise – pleading quarter, right? – then you lose the contract and it goes to the other greenhorn.”

“Simple,” Simra grimaced, swallowing. “Least it would be for someone who’s slept in the last—” He calculated, trying to come to a guess. “—well fuck that to the Void and back, by then it’ll be a full day I’ve been awake.”

“And?” Vesh said, rising out of his usual quiet.

“‘And’ is fair enough,” snorted Kjeld. “D’you think there’s a soldier that’s ever lived that hasn’t had to fight after worse?”

“And not with sticks either,” said Siska.

Simra kissed his teeth. “I see your point. But if you want me to be happy about it you’re pissing up the wrong fucking tree. Blight! you’re pissing in the wrong fucking forest..!”

“You have until the start of sundown,” said Vesh, the only one still with a straight face. Even quiet Shora was halfway to smiling. “I suggest you learn to nap.”

Siska’s tent was dim but not dark. Daylight pierced through the doorflap, blinking out whenever a set of wet-sucking footsteps passed by, then returning just as bright. The sides were leather, hide turned outwards, and the heat inside gathered stifling alongside Siska’s scent. The black acridity of her gut-settling gum; the warm rich not-quite-reek of tanned goatskin; something smooth, biscuit-crumbly that might have been her beneath all the rest.

Simra tried to sleep, crescent-curled on his side with both elbows crooked under his head and his wadded up tunic for a pillow. But the proving was a sharp kind of knowing behind his eyes, stirring up his insides and drying up his mouth. Almost as bad as the knowing was not-knowing. Who was the other hopeful? What were his odds? He’d said it himself: he’d never been much of a scrapper. What he had been, sometimes, was a fast learner — or at least a determined one.

It seemed the others had done some learning too. Or else they’d adapted to this way of life, looking at ease in the camp-clearing, just like they had at their hollow in the mountains. But they looked leaner now in a way that didn’t speak so much of hunger as things they’d seen and done. How much could happen in a year?

Siska wore a piece of quilted leather armour over her shoulders, collar rising high up her neck, and layered wool sleeved her left arm. Her waist and hips were striped with at least six belts and perhaps twice as many knives and other sharp nasty things. Skirts of the same leather hung down to her knees. Her hair was shorter than before, tangling out only a couple of inches from her scalp.

Kjeld had a short mottled-green jacket now, coinlike studs stitched to the shoulders and the arms’ upsides. His hands were always busy with a knife, shaping something or breaking something, and his leggings were covered from the knee down by strip-metal greaves.

Vesh had a half-healed blunt little nick on his forehead, raw and red against his green-grey skin. A wide belt girdled his waist with a curved iron disk protecting his belly. A butcherish leather apron fell from the belt, full of pockets and pouches that jingled when he moved.

Even Shora seemed to have aged, growing awkward-tall, longer and thicker haired, but still just as quiet. She cradled the shield her father had made for her, a year-and-some before, as if it were a doll much too big to hug her arms around.

And still Simra tried to sleep.

But the camp was alive around him. Footsteps came and went. There were shouts of dismay, triumph, loud threats — the kind of sounds that come from games of chance, knucklebones, cards. Conversations passed, snatching in and out of earshot. Simra thought he heard at least one of them talking about him — gambling on him.

“…the little greyling? Shor’s balls, odds are…”

Then there was the closer, more constant set of sounds that wiled on through the afternoon. The scrape-and-scrape of someone sharpening iron. The careful-timed near-gentle clangour of someone forcing the dents out of armour or shield-bosses. Those same sounds had become more and more common throughout Windhelm this past year. But the singing was unfamiliar.

“…dig a hole, a deep hole in the valley,  
dig a hole in that cold an’ dark ground,  
dig a hole an’ lay stones in that valley,  
I long for to lay me down…”

Perhaps he’d heard parts of the songs before, on the docks maybe. Songs of gallow-trees and lovers doomed to loneliness by war. Songs of wild roses woven into dark hair, waiting each day for someone’s return, as the dark hair turned grey and the roses wilted. But the melodies and the voice were strange. Here it almost droned, then lunged up wild into a half-controlled timbre, wavering to breaking-point then flowing smoothly back from the brink. It was a female voice, in time to the smith-work if not to its tune.

“…if I had a drink of brandy  
or e’en a drink of wine  
I’d drink oh to my sorrow  
as the last of my line…”

It wasn’t a lullaby. But he slept then all the same.

“Simra?” A small voice, touching gentle at the edge of his thinking. “Simra, sun’s going down.”

He opened his eyes and smacked aside the doorflap. It was Shora, crouching outside in the strange-light of sunset. There were no shouts in the camp now, none that he could hear. Only a kind of low murmur, like something waiting to happen: silence or a roar.

“Coming,” Simra mumbled groggily. “Jus’ a moment.”

Gathering himself and his things, he hauled himself out of the tent and onto the path. He stretched, back and shoulders grumbling and clicking as he tried to push life back into his limbs and muscles, rub the signs of a halting shortish sleep from his eyes. Shora led Simra through the encampment, back towards the clearing.

There were crowds now, huddling together, talking and gesturing. There was the grey-haired woman from before, and there was an Argonian. There was a flash of dim-red eyes, crow-dark hair. The sound and smell of drink were in the air: sourish cutting ale and oversweet head-aching mead. The rippling crush of bodies closed off the clearing’s edges, made it seem smaller now, whirling round a single open space. The crowds parted, inch by inch. Shora led him to shoulder his way through, into the eye of the storm.

A hush fell. Or else his hearing cut suddenly narrow. Simra heard his heartbeat all too loud. He stood at the ring’s edge. A proving ring, a ring of bodies, a ring for fighting in. Some part of his brain turned those facts over and over, already terrified into a numb kind of confusion.

Someone was speaking. He recognised the voice, but it was hard to make sense of the words except in snatches. Like the words had already come and gone, left him with half-memories of them as they slipped towards being forgotten.

“— two new faces — encampment — but who — the privilege, the honour — our fire at night — our ranks in battle — side by side and shield to shield — two strangers — one contract — young company but we have our ways — one will fall — as witness — prove!”

“Prove!” The crowd took up that last word, bellowing it, repeating it into a chant or a prayer. “Prove! Prove! Prove!”

The words melted together till they made a sound without beginning or end, just ebb and flow, like waves on a shore. Just noise. Simra couldn’t think through it. But he could see, hear, feel. And he felt his muscles trembling as something flooded them. The battle-blood maybe, or just fear. And the difference was..?

Someone threw something in front of him. A piece of rough-carved wood stuck in the mud, as long as his arm, perhaps three-fingers thick. At one end it thinned a little, then sparred out into something like a pommel — like the winged lugs on his spearhead. Simra stepped forward like a sleepwalker, and wrapped his right hand round the makeshift grip.

“Begin!”

The crowd screamed. Simra’s head was full of screaming. Then all the screaming was in his arms and legs, feet and griplocked fingers, and his skull was filled with silence.

Firelight and strange-light, the sun was half-sunk somewhere beyond the ring. It bathed the rills of the mud in warm colours. When the other figure rushed forward, the sunset lit them bloodsoaked, redwashed.

A Nord, youngish, sparse-bearded. A half-remembered face and bullish shoulders, tree-trunk legs and swinging arms.

A sword. Simra was thinking of them as swords now. The Nord’s sword swung down hard, splitting the air, barring it split-second dark. Simra had slipped into an alley-scrapper’s crouch. One bent knee straightened, pushed him surging backwards and out of the way. There were hands against his back, catching him kind and pushing him cruel. He was already at the ring’s edge.

Catch and push fought for a moment, then push won out, pushed hard. Simra staggered forceful, forward, into the reach of another sidelong swipe. He lurched further, beyond the length of the sword-stick. All that hit him was the unready meat of a fist. It was a dull report against his left shoulder. He stumbled through the half-blow, headlong into the Nord’s broad chest.

The air broke out from both their lungs. They struggled a moment, then tumbled and sprawled. There was a cold damp cling on Simra as he rolled, grubbing free, making space. Clumsy but quick, he scrambled to his feet again, resumed his crouch.

Remember to see, hear, feel.

There was still rough wood under his fingers. Good. A sword. But he’d never held a sword. One-handed he brandished it out in front of him, making space, warning off.

The Nord with the familiar face had found his footing. He came at Simra again, swinging hard at his outheld stick-sword, beating it aside. The impact cracked through the wood, jarred Simra’s wrist as he tried to withstand it. The Nord was stronger by far and that made him fast too. It was all Simra could do to slip back again, feet uneasy on the tricky mud, rolling inadvertent with the force of the strike.

Another blow. A dazzling snap across the side of his head, ringing with a drowning pain. Simra’s knees buckled. He was facing the crowd with half-blind eyes. And again. A spreading blaze where neck met shoulder, bleeding down to glare between his shoulderblades. The Nord beat him into the dirt, raining down strike after strike.

Simra’s voice thrummed, rose, broke. Was he screaming, pleading, or shouting? On hands and knees he kicked backwards with one boot, straight out like a mule. Any knowing now came through a thicket of aches and sharp-thorned feeling. It made him awkward as he crawled round, lashing out weak with an arm to strike near-useless against one firm leg. Hitting out hurt more than it was worth.

It was hard to see for feeling, hard to hear for noise. There was no rough wood in his hand now. What did he have? What else did he have in his hands? Callouses, roughness, fate-meaningless lines. Black dirt between his splayed fingertips. And? Sunset air gathered gasping into his lungs. The beginnings of a prickling starving something, starting to jitter now between the bones of his knuckles.

The fire’s lit. Just help the burning happen. Something will always be eaten.

Sparks gushed and steam snarled through the air. Flicker then flash. Simra lashed out with one shower of flames, steam, mud turned to smoke and fluttering cinders. He made space. He fought to his feet. Standing was hard but the fire came easy.

There were glimmerings of half-dead flame scattered in a swathe around him. Easier still. He gathered them up, weaving with his fingers, feeling the black burning dirt on his hands. He threw them forward in a blast of soot-flecked unchecked heat. Making space.

Ostwulf had once said, leave an enemy worth fighting nothing left to fight with. No means, no will. Make a point and make it clear. And that was clear in Simra’s mind now, when everything else was haze, unsure and smoldering.

“Is it fucking worth it?” he heard himself howl. “Is it worth fucking trying again?”

There was a shape thrashing in the mud. It was trying to cover itself, quench itself, rolling and rolling in the mire. Like a pig. And the smell was like fatback frying. Black smoke choked up in wisps and runnels.

The battle-blood faded. Or was it the terror that had no cause anymore? Simra felt like his stomach had been pulled out from under him. He was cold, shivering, retching, lungs full of stench. Burning fat and searing skin.


	9. Chapter 9

> _I woke. The back of my skull throbbed. Like someone had spent the night trying to pry it open with the wrong-end of an axe-head. Behind and below that, a stiff scabbed-over feeling, laid like a second skin over the whole of my flesh._
> 
> _Tangled up in myself and my crease-rilled clothes, I lay in the mud at the camp-clearing’s edge. Every blow I took the night before came back to haunt me. And together the low-murmuring pain was too loud for me to reckon them into individual hurts. Instead, just one bruise, plaintive throughout my body, wrapped round the shiftless-stubborn weight of my hangover._
> 
> _If not for the milk-eyed memories I had of what came after, I’d have reckoned this is where I’d fallen at the end of the fight, and stayed till firstlight came to poke and jab me wakeful. Dawn found me mud-caked, aching all over. Thankful the night brought no snow. Trying to sieve separate the kinds of pain I was in._
> 
> _The brow round my left eye, swollen and darkening; a tender bruise and split skin at its crown, dried blood. My shoulder and back trying to move round bits of muscle that wouldn’t, like they’d been bashed into useless sleep. My lip, burst open and swollen, hard with dried blood. My head ached from the inside as well as the out. I’d skinned my knees and hands, burnt my palms and fingers to tingling._
> 
> _And that’s where the memories began. There were cheers that turned roaring as toast after toast was called._
> 
> _“A drink poured to slake the soil for blood already shed! — And a drink poured to slake our throats for coin yet to come! — And a drink poured to whet our thirsts for new blood, new drinks, new names and new faces! — A drink poured to show our mettle for one who’s proven his!”_
> 
> _“Proven!” they all cried, over and over._
> 
> _And after the first sip splashed into the soil, we drank, and drank, and we all drank again. A ridged curl of horn pressed into my hand to replace the stick-sword I’d lost. The crowd flooded in round me, so close now that just the nearness of their bodies propped me up and helped me stand. For a while the drink made standing easier still, but it turned everything else to fog. Except that I was upright, then I wasn’t, then I was on my feet again. My stomach had settled. I’d stopped shaking._
> 
> _I remember songs that turned sharp to dins and tumults, loud and artless as swordflats and spearhafts bashed against the faces of shields. One voice, maybe, or dozens of voices — no telling, and what did it matter? I sang along without knowing the words. There were faces that I forgot, even as they swam before my blurring eyes._
> 
> _Perhaps this is a strange way to start a new journal._
> 
> _(And after all, a journal’s what this is. It’s what I stole this book for. The ledger I tricked out of Torbjorn Shattershield’s pocket — his coin for these pages, like tickling trout from a river. Soraya would have called it poet’s justice, approving, liking that I’d stolen a book from someone who’d stolen my book-learning and a half-year of my life traded in for a daily pittance. But I’d call it sense. A drop of silver gone from Torbjorn’s ocean of coin, to buy me something that would’ve drained my paltry puddle of coppers dry. Justice by the law of proportions.)_
> 
> _So — strange, perhaps. Except if this isn’t just a journal. I read back what I’ve written on this first page and it reads like a story. It’s the broader pages maybe. They’re a kind of luxury and a kind of temptation. Like standing on a precipice, surrounded by space, and wanting to shout to see if you can fill it._
> 
> _If a story’s what this is, as well as a journal, then here’s its beginning. I’ve got a great foreboding loomer of a feeling that this might be the way I begin many more mornings to come._

The pages were creamy parchment. His fingertips were scorched halfway inert, but he could still feel the way they slipped smooth across one side of each leaf, caught just a little on the other. It was a rich heady feeling, even for a head already full of the ache and blame of worn-off drink. Simra only wished his ink and pens were better. It seemed almost a shame to ruin the pages with runes that blotted, turned blind, or spattered errant black whenever they could.

But with the ledger closed, smart and clasped shut, who’d be any the wiser? The covers were thickish leather, undecorated except for the gloss that came from being new-tanned, newly cut to size, new-bound round the pages inside. The spine was solid, stitched and restitched to keep the folio of leaves fixed tight. The back cover lipped up and over the book’s exposed belly. It overlapped the front-face, fastened with a hide tie, protecting the pages on at least one side.

Sturdy, maybe three fingers thick in all, made from good hard-wearing things. Pages upon pages; enough for a lifetime, for words upon words upon words. It was the prettiest thing Simra had ever owned. Covered with dry dark mud, trying to decide if he felt sick or just hungry, he sat with it cradled on his lap, blotting the pages with writing.

“Well, bless! You look like a thing chewed up and spat out! Which is to say, you look worse’n I feel, and I feel grimmer’n a smokehouse floor.”

A voice broke in through Simra’s hazy thoughts and focus. He’d heard it before, singing, but its talk was flattish and different. Rough on the fringes, harsh on the edges, it took him by surprise. By the time he looked up, Simra was already grimacing, ready to bite back.

He hadn’t expected a mer. A little like the commander’s but twisted and bent somehow, her accent had backfooted him. But folded through it was the husk and rasp of his parents’ voices. Not an accent — something breathed in with the air of a land he’d never seen. By her eyes and ears, a sharpness in some of her features, she was a Dunmer. But her skin was warm-brown, washed through with the maroons and purples most Dunmer only showed when blushing. There was mannish blood in her, somewhere down the line.

“Fought someone last night for the chance to sign a bit of paper.” Simra’s voice came out slurred, drunk on bad sleep. He closed the ledger protectively. “Tell me who I fight to get a bath round here and I’ll fucking fight them.”

“You mean now? When you’re doing such a fine job playing at being a hog there?”

Her stance was wide and stable. She leaned forward from the waist, inching close as if to sniff or inspect him. Crow-black hair hung straightish down about her broad-cheeked face. It looked like it was fighting its own war. A few messy chest-length plaits fought to hold the lot in check. The rest fought to get free, wisping wild from any attempt to tame it.

“It’s not my fault I—” Simra stopped that lie mid-sentence, before he could finish telling it. He shifted his seating, trying to repair the distance between them where she’d closed it. When he’d found a snatch of space, he raised painful onto his feet. “Who in Oblivion are you?” He could talk vinegar too. It was easier once he found he was a good head-and-shoulders taller than her.

“New sister-in-arms, I reckon.” Her lips twisted, hard to tell if it was meant to be a smile or a snarl. A scar curled through the right edge of her mouth. “But you can call me Moridene. Least you can if you find some manners sometime this Era.”

“Well, Moridene…” Simra rolled the name round the inside of his parched mouth. “What’s it you—”

“Want? Why’m I here? I’m not breathing your stink by any choice of my own if that’s what you mean. Toli wants to see you, and me being the one gets all the best jobs, he asked me if I wouldn’t go fetch your carcass for’m, bless his withered heart.”

“Toli?”

“Antolios,” Moridene spelt it out like he was stupid. “The boss.”

She stepped in close again and poked a finger at the cover of Simra’s book. He flinched back. Like she’d jabbed him hard in the belly. That seemed to make her happier, easing her scowl but not wiping it away.

“Come on,” she said. “Reckon he’s got some writing of his own he wants done.”

She turned tail, walked off across the clearing. One of her hands slipped habitual onto the pommel of a broadish shortsword belted on one hip, sheathed below a wicked-skinny dagger. Simra looked on, trying not to think about what Gitur had once said about watching folk from behind. He gathered himself up and followed.

Toli had presided over the proving last night. He’d called each toast and drunk a little at every one, but here he sat behind his desk as if he hadn’t moved since yesterday morning. Dry and tired, sensible as before, this time he didn’t look up to see Simra enter.

“I will remind you once more. Rolff gave quarter of his own free will.”

“And what did it prove? I ask you, Toli! What? Not that my son is a coward! Nothing at all. Except that the little scrawn of a greyling knows how to cheat!”

“Except, Hennig, that he knows where he’s strong, where he’s weak, and will press an advantage when he sees one.”

“By witching my son!”

“Yes, by magic, Hennig. That’s something the gods have seen fit to trust us with in this world, in case you hadn’t noticed. He wouldn’t be the first mage under the Vahn, would he?”

Toli was pitting his weary patient voice against a broad-shouldered Nord wrapped in heavy wools. Fair beard bristling and face ruddy with rage, Hennig bore down on the table, throwing Toli into his shadow. The smaller dark-haired man didn’t shift an inch.

“Then mayhap that’s the problem,” Hennig spat. “I would die of shame before I let my son smear his honour by lending shield and axe to a coven of finger-wigglers and charm-talkers! I would rather leave this company than—!”

“Then consider yourself dismissed, Hennig.” Toli spoke quick, even, and cold as steel. “This banner has no use for any savage who would rather squat and shit and freeze in the mud than rub two sticks together and make a fire. Who would rather bleed to death than have a ragged wound sealed over with a spell.”

Moridene had slipped out, leaving Simra alone with the two men. Hennig caught sight of him, eyes bulging from under his deep hard brow.

“No Stone-Fist suffers insult lightly, Imperial. Know that!” The Nord made a cuckold’s horns with one hand at Toli, spat onto the tent floor, then pushed past Simra, breathing like he’d just run three miles. “Know what a mistake you’ve made in trading one worm for two bears!”

Simra and Toli were alone. For a time the dark-haired man looked on in silence, peering Simra up and down, appraising.

“You look like you’re starting to regret me,” Simra said eventually.

“I try to remain a cynic about most things.” Toli sounded as if the conversation with Hennig had aged him five years. As if he’d not slept last night, or all the week before. He sighed. “It means, however, that I’m often pleasantly surprised.”

“And you’re hoping a certain mud-caked elf will surprise you?”

“Pleasantly.” Toli didn’t smile.

“You called me here,” said Simra, turning it into a question.

“I did. There’s the matter of a contract to sign. And a number of questions to be asked. Paperwork with a small side of curiosity.”

“And the fact that you called me up in the middle of all…” Simra gestured behind him, to the tentflap Hennig had just left through. “…That?”

“Pure coincidence.” Toli’s lips stayed tight-set but his eyes were smiling. “Hennig was a fool, his son Rolff, a brat…Nords…They weren’t always this way, you know. But certain things changed the way they looked at their clevermen, runewitches and court-wizards, let alone mages with ways not their own. Winterhold was a tipping point, I suppose. But the result? It’s a liability.”

“Sir?” Simra frowned, wondering who Skyrim had changed more these last two centuries: his people or its own.

“Antolios,” Toli corrected. “Save the ‘sir’, ‘boss’, ‘kentarch’ and so on for when we’re in battle-order or for when I have your wages jingling in my palm. Now — tell me your name.”

“Thought you knew my name…”

“Yes, but I need you to tell me it.”

“Another way you have of doing things here?”

“Another demand that paperwork makes on me.”

“I can understand that. My name is Simra Hishkari…”

“Good. And you are a…dark elf?”

“Dunmer.”

“Indeed. And your birthsign..?”

And on, and on…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Moridene as a character belongs to and has been borrowed by the gracious permission of the wonderful SithisBones, whose art and excellence you can find on sithisbones.tumblr.com. Follow that link for art that does things my descriptions never could. Follow that blog for awesome illustrations and outfit-porn beyond your wildest dreams.]


	10. Chapter 10

 

 

_Antolios asked questions till the morning was done, then on a ways past noon. He said that I should be honest. I had nothing to lie about, as the contract was already mine. This was only a matter of documenting me. Surveying me to figure out where I could be useful. But by the time he was done, and his quill stopped twitching, I felt laid bare. Like Moridene had said: something chewed up and spat out._  
  
_He asked me my name. I told him my name is Simra Hishkari. He reckoned it to be ashlander by its sound, and I told him that, yes, the name was. And I wondered who he was or who he had been, what he had done, to get an ear for ashlander names._  
  
_He asked the sign and year of my birth. The Thief, I told him, not mentioning that the Serpent had my sign all but in its coils at the time. I was born in the 173rd year of the Fourth Era, at the cold and long-dark turning point of a Winter people spoke about for half a dozen Winters afterward. Or so my mother told me. I am now 18 Winters old._  
  
_“Past Professions?”_  
  
_I worked backwards. I told him I had been a scrivener for a shipping firm. And before that, a dockworker, hauling and hooking cargo, loading and unloading holds. He looked up brief and wordless at that, as if to say my build fit a scribe far better than a stevedore. Before that I had spent some time as a wanderer, foraging for sustenance and simples. And with Siska, Vesh, Kjeld and Shora in Skyrim’s eastern mountain hinterlands, learning a freckling of gardening, goat-herding, butchery, cookery. Before that I had been a child in the Grey Quarter, and an extra pair of hands in a bookseller’s and by my mother’s hearth._  
  
_“And your skills?” he asked. “What can you do for the Vahn?”_  
  
_No matter what Soraya always told me about what a trap modesty is, and how dangerous a culture of humbleness can be, it’s difficult to talk about myself for so long. Even talking in mixed terms – pride here, an admission of a failing or lack there – it was difficult. Strange — I had to search inside myself before I could even start to tell him. But I told him all the same._  
  
_I can read and write well and quickly, in standard Tamrielic letters and Skyrim’s half-runed script. I speak Eastmark – the local dialect of Tamrielic – and the system of slang and loaned words used in the Quarter, but neither so thickly that I can’t make or understand other forms. I speak and understand a Dunmeris too general and flimsy to belong to any particular House or tribe — I’d never pass for a native, but can make my intentions known and make good sense of others’. My reading and writing in it, however, stand next to nothing._  
  
_I can tally costs, calculate profit and loss, and record them. I have a good head for thrift. I can balance or unbalance an accounting ledger as needed. I can figure the worth of a few kinds of foreign coin, and can haggle, barter, call bluffs and bullshit. Most of the time in any case…_  
  
_I can cook a little, run and climb, my eyes are sharp and my hands—_  
  
_“Well and good,” he interrupted. “But what use would you be in battle? You have a passable aptitude for Destruction magicks, you’ve made that clear enough. Unhoned, perhaps, but workable. What else?”_  
  
_“It’s Firecalling,” I corrected him. “Not Guild magic.”_  
  
_“Clearly,” he said, sounding unconvinced._  
  
_But I told him I can call fire, make smoke and magelight. That I learn quickly, began to work magic while I was young, seeding the power early, giving it years to grow. That I’d like to learn more, grow more. And he said flatly that’s more than many can or will do._  
  
_I’m quick, or think I’m quick, and hardy too. I’ve been in brawls but lost more than I’ve won. I’ve been hurt enough times before that I’m good by now at working through it. Antolios pointed the back end of his quill at my face – my scarred lip – and asked me if he was right in thinking it was a knife-wound. I said it was. A cut through to the teeth, but we cleaned and stitched it back to a scar._  
  
_“Have you ever been stabbed?” he asked. “Cut with an axe or a sword? Broken a bone?”_  
  
_For once I was proud of my scarred mouth. The pride was short-lived. His question surprised me, made me shy to admit that no, I had only broken my nose. And I fell sullen as we spoke on._  
  
_I have never used, owned, or even held a sword. The same’s true for shields and axes. I wouldn’t know where to begin with a bow. I’ve never owned, worn, or trained in any kind of armour. For a while I carried something almost like a spear, or a bill-hook maybe, but never really used it as a weapon. Even knives — I’ve never actually fought with a knife. I can’t ride. Anything I know about warfare, the arts or ways of combat, comes from songs, stories, poems…_  
  
_Confession after confession, stripping me down to bare and useless bones. I stood awkward, losing ground, losing face. I felt like a child again, losing one of my mother’s teaching-games. But Antolios only wrote. No comment from him either way._  
  
_“I have one more question,” he said. “And there’s no need to clarify or explain your answer. Have you ever killed another person?”_  
  
_I hesitated. But I thought of the night by the docks, mudlarking with Gitur, and I felt the six-sided rune-etched ring on my finger. “Yes,” I said quietly._  
  
_He nodded. “Then there’s the matter of a contract to sign.”_  
  
_The terms?_  
  
_I would align myself with the Red Vahn for a sixmonth span. After, I would be free to go my own way, or review that span with the Vahn’s commander at that time, and sign another similar contract in light of how useful I’d been as an asset. In camp and while travelling, I would obey direct orders from the current quartermaster. In battle I would obey direct orders from the Vahn’s commander._  
  
_In return I would earn half a single share in any profits. I would be entitled to two meals per day where possible. I would be allowed to loan equipment from the Vahn’s quartermaster with the span’s eventual wages as collateral. I would be permitted to loot any combatant I personally defeated—_  
  
_“Hold on,” I said. “A half-share? Why only a half? I’m a whole person, aren’t I?”_  
  
_“But not a whole warrior. You said so yourself only minutes ago. And as I said, after a span of six months, your value will be reviewed, and perhaps your share will increase in your next contract. Besides, the Vahn is a collective. Profits are what you make of them, and so is even a half-share. Accept our terms or follow Hennig. Tell him you scarred his son for nothing after all, and come back when you can tell the sharp end of a sword from the scuffed heel of my boot.”_  
  
_I accepted. I had never been asked for my signature before. I didn’t know that I had one. I wrote my name at the bottom of his contract. He folded, sealed, and dated it for opening and expiration on the 24th of Midyear, 4E 192._  
  
_A warm bath would’ve been the most welcome thing in the world after that and the night that came before. But when I found Kjeld and asked, he said the whole muster-camp bathed in the river, across from the docks. I grimaced at the idea, knowing too well what’s already gone into its flow by that point on its course — after all, isn’t the point of a bath to get clean? So I took my satchel and soap out of camp and a ways upstream of the docks, till the White River ran whitish not brown._  
  
_Freezing cold, I scourged the mud off my body, rinsed my clothes. With clattering teeth I found a flat riverside stone and called up a slow lapping of flames to warm it._  
  
_My wet clothes are stretched over it, sizzling slowly dry. I huddle close as I can, in my undershirt and loin-clout, but I’m still too cold to keep my hands from shaking. Making a blighted mess of this page as a result, but I’d rather wait and write than wait and make nothing of the lost time._  
  
_Thanks be for the quiet here. Only snow and snowbreaching early wildflowers, and circling birds to see me stupid and shivering in my underthings…_

 


	11. Chapter 11

> _The Vahn is paid per job, not on the regular. For a company that makes such a point of gold over glory, people don’t carry much in the way of coin. Between hirings, the camp turns on a wheel of barter, borrowing, and swapped favours. Even gambling, the mercs stake their chores and duties; goods and promises, not copper and silver._
> 
> _I keep my savings close, hidden, and divided across different pouches and purses. I’ve got some trust in my new comrades in arms, but I’m not stupid enough to forget that trust’s a length of rope. Sometimes it’s a lifeline, sometimes it’s the noose folk use to hang you by._
> 
> _The wheel turns. Kjeld gives someone a bucket of charcoal, on faith that tomorrow that someone’ll give Shora a lesson in using her shield. They take the charcoal to Vesh, who uses it to make them half a dozen arrowheads in return for as many cups of ale from them that night. Siska goes to Chioma – the cook – and gives him meat in exchange for salt and a more generous bowlful once the meat becomes a meal. In fact, everyone’s careful to do right by Chioma, knowing that how hungry they go or how hearty they eat comes down to the Redguard’s whims._
> 
> _The wheel turns on. And for the most part, I reckon it turns round Ra’baali, the quartermaster. People stay occupied, but she’s the one that really puts them to work for the Vahn, not just for themselves. So many spokes, wheeling and dealing, but she’s the hub._

Rain drummed on the roof of Ra’baali’s tent. Where the wax on the cloth had worn through, water dripped a rhythm down. The floor was reeds and rugs, but there were only tightrope-thin trails of it to be seen between moundings of clutter. The rain dripped onto travel-chests, saltboxes, bolts of wool and skeins of leather. Locked like pillories, racks of weapons grouped round a covered wagon, looming in the tent’s middle.

Antolios had the camp’s biggest tent, but its size was all symbol, standing near-empty beside the banner at the camp’s muddy heart. Ra’baali’s was only slightly smaller but hers was full, packed to brimming and beyond. The wagon was big enough in its own right that it’d take three strong draught-horses to pull. Its bulk divided the tent’s inside into aisles and corners. In the wagon and out of it, hardly a snatch of space was unused.

Ra’baali stepped up onto the cart and inside, rooting through the gloom. A nervous purr sounded in the back of her throat. She checked inside unlabelled sacks, clicked open lockboxes then shut them once more. No telling if she was searching at random, or using a secret system only she understood. He wondered if she kept her tent dark so that only her glass-green cat’s eyes could find what they were looking for.

“…Rye, yes, and oats. Stripmeat? Not enough. Hardybreads, yes, but not enough to march on. Not nearly enough of nearly enough…” She muttered, but only to herself.

Simra stood by, waiting to be spoken to. He’d done the same each morning for the last three days. By now he was used to Ra’baali’s rambling. How she never seemed pleased with what they had in-store, yet still kept the Vahn from starving. How she’d finish her morning stocktake, then his work would begin.

Yesterday he’d been sent off to Chioma with a sack of potatoes and turnips, and a paring knife. He’d spent the afternoon peeling the roots, listening to the cook lamenting their ingredients. “For once,” he’d said, “Four-armed Morwha! just once, let me cook something that isn’t doomed to be brown or beige.” The day before, Simra had been sent out with a purse of the quartermaster’s coin – and a threat that if he didn’t come back, Ra’baali had his scent and would find him – to buy the roots and tubers from one of the muster-camp’s raucous markets.

“…And you!”

Ra’baali had turned to him now. She hopped onto the wagon’s back-step and sat, eyes glinting in the shadows, fingers kneading against her knees. She was the first Ohmes he’d met. Her skin was unfurred, her ears pointed. At first it was hard not to mistake her for a mer. But the tufting towards her ear-tips, the tabby-striped mask tattooed onto her face, those green cattish eyes and her strange cattish manners marked her out as a Khajiit.

“Ra’baali knows why Simra Hishkari is still here! Skulking round my ankles like a cream-hopeful kitten. Fffeh!” She gave a small hiss.

“You considered that maybe I want to help?”

“Fffeh!” She sounded like someone trying to scowl off a bad taste, lingering under their tongue. “This Ra’baali has learnt in her many years of life and her many miles of travel. No-one helps to be helping. Everyone wants something in return. Ra’baali knows this to be true. So — what does Simra Hishkari want from Ra’baali, hm?”

He glanced over at one of the locked racks. A bearded great-axe, a tall teardrop-shaped shield, a straight bladed sword with a pommel like a fish-tail that Simra had wanted to touch since he first saw it. A side-fastening jacket of smooth-clinking scales, carved from what might’ve been horn or horse-hooves.

“I read my contract,” he said firmly, slipping into his barter-voice. “It says you’re to outfit me if I ask.”

“Ra’baali is to loan contractors equipment, if Ra’baali sees fit,” she corrected him smugly. “Today, Ra’baali does not see fit.”

“That’s crowshit,” said Simra icily. “How’m I gonna be good for anything but peeling potatoes and lighting cookfires if I don’t have anything to fight with? Piss on that! Till I get any gear of my own I can borrow from you, right? Against credit and collateral from my next lot of wages, right? Those’re the terms!”

“Do you question Ra’baali’s wisdom when it keeps you and twenty-seven others from going hungry? No. So understand that maybe Ra’baali has reasons for not lending you steel. Just because the Red Vahn has bread, does Simra Hishkari ask for an extra share? No. Steel or food, they must be shared properly…”

“And if someone hired us tomorrow,” began Simra, “there wouldn’t be enough of either, would there?”

“Simra Hishkari has been listening,” nodded Ra’baali, almost appreciative. “There must be enough for us all before there can be enough to give to only one.”

A small glimmer of pride. Simra thought for a moment in silence. Colour had risen in his cheeks, hottish in the gloom, but his last flash of anger had ebbed away. “What if I helped with that?” he finally said. “Got us some iron. Reckon I’d get some back in return?”

> _The mercenaries sustain themselves well enough in camp. As individuals, they know how to work and exchange for what they want. But from hanging round Ra’baali, I’ve learnt the Vahn itself is poor and hungry, just from making sure that those who live under it aren’t._
> 
> _The Vahn’s starving for iron, equipment, and there are rumours in the muster-camp beyond our banner. That the whole muster’s fulfilled its purpose now. That it’s almost done forming up into another fyrd. That the king intends on putting it to use. That the fyrd will march when the rains and cold let up a little. The free companies hired on to help will march with them. And the Vahn isn’t ready to be among them yet._
> 
> _But I’ve heard other rumours too. Some, I reckon, might be play remedy to at least one of the Vahn’s problems. If they’re true, and if I’m clever, and I hope they are, and I hope I am. Ra’baali was right — I’d be stupid to help for helping’s own sakes. But if the Vahn gains, so do I._


	12. Chapter 12

The rain-black sky was filled with thunder. Evening-dark and weather-darkness, the difference had grown vague. If night had begun to fall then it was set to be a starless one, thick with clouds, lit only by the flash and flicker that follows thunder. Hidden moons lurked overhead; shadows tangled below.  
  
The lightning’s afterglare danced eerie under the dripping pines. Simra sat at the forest edge, hunched on the flat-hewn roots of a felled tree. His sharp-edged face showed glare-lit. Stark cheekbones, thin jaw; broken nose, scar-mended ruin of a mouth. The harsh gleam made them look harsher too, worse than usual. His face was hawkish a moment, maimed by brightness and shadow, then lost in blackness again. Simra was left with the cling of his wet clothes, the run and vein of water on his brow and streaming through his hair. It was skull-flush, neck-slick, clammed and heavy on his skin.  
  
Something called out in the dark. Simra knew the names of some birds, even what some looked like, but not enough to link the names to sounds and soaring shapes against the sky, except with wild guesswork. Perhaps this one was an owl? He couldn’t be certain. His mind was wandering, getting restless as his shoulders shook from the deepening cold and his legs ached from sitting so long.  
  
Simra’s eyes strained, peering off into the near-distance. His wooded hillside rose up from the river-fork valley where the muster-camp was pitched. All round the camp, the trees had been cut away, leaving the hill caltropped with sharps of stump and orphaned branches. But on this flank the woods were thicker, the felled stumps newer. The forest skirted out, thinned down with the hillside, towards a moat of bramble, brackish snowmelt, gathering rainfall. Beyond the ditch, rocks crested off and upwards, jutting like a ship’s prow over the valley and the road that ran westward through it.  
  
Torches burnt there. Figures moved round a bonfire. Simra tried to catch their words. They were only a stone’s throw off but the wind blew hard and the rain made seeing blurry. Even firelit and calling out to each other, all but trying to be noticed, he could hardly see or hear them. If he tried to stay silent, stuck to the shadows..?  
  
“Fuck this,” Simra muttered. “Fuck this to the void and back.” Shrugging his rain-heavy mantle closer round his shoulders – warmer round his body, tighter round his neck – he got up and set off down toward the ditch. “Of all the blighted stupid things boredom’ll make you do…”  
  
He snagged and fretted his way through the thorns, trying not to swear now as he got closer. Any other time he’d have burnt a path and called it good practice, like stretching a muscle to keep it strong. (Or else like feeding an ember to keep it glowing, remembering his mother’s words about Firecalling: something will always be eaten.) But here he rustled and splashed, counting on the wind to keep him silent. He could go unseen in crowds, but this back-county skulking was unfamiliar, awkward, embarrassing. No telling if he hated how bad he was at it, or hated it because of how bad he was — the hate was there all the same.  
  
On the ditch’s far bank, Simra stopped and looked out. He could see almost clearly now. The shrine spurred up, like the rumours promised, hacked from the headland’s barren grey stone. A kind of irregular dais had been carved there. On top of it, a squat weather-smoothed idol had been set: a stone man in a crowned helmet. The suggestion of a downpointing swordblade was etched onto his front. The only other detail looked at first like the locks of a long beard, but began from a shadowed niche taken out of the idol’s neck. Not a beard then, but tumbling flows of blood from a carven-cut throat.  
  
“Ysmir of Guiding Whispers! Called Talos at birth, Talos and more than Talos in glorious after-death! You, whose Voice was near-stilled but would not be silent! You, whose rule was fair by force of your whispers alone, and whose rule was wise by listening! Listen now to your faithful — sons and daughters, supplicants all!”  
  
They were dressed for battle. Mail shirts gritted and whined against the rain. Water slid off the down-angled scabbards of swords and pooled in the bowl of the speaker’s tall high-crested helmet, upended and outheld like a chalice. The worshippers joined their voices to hers now and then, shouting a name, muttering reverent through a section of the long-winding prayer. But mostly the woman spoke, face and cupped helmet raised skyward, a mane of ice-grey hair flat against her scalp.  
  
“Crowned above all crowns of men! Your throne, like a mountain spring, where the power in every ruler’s throne must find its source! Wise and Mighty Ysmir, let your whispers guide us. Guide our king to war, and guide your faithful to glory!”  
  
The other men and women tilted their heads back and let go a howling battlecry. When one worshipper’s breath ran empty, another filled their lungs and howled again. There were eight of them maybe, all decked half-familiar with Eastmarch warrior’s trappings. Aprons of armour hung from their throats, stitched with rectangular plates of metal, tough leather, or hardwood, reaching down to their knees. Mantles of chainmail or quilted leather protected them shoulder to elbow. But over that, each of them wore a scarf or cape of Stormcloak blue. They beat swordflats, spear-hafts, the blunts of their axes against long oval shields, calling on their god.  
  
Simra’s skin crawled and his feet shuffled uneasy, boots planted difficult in the ditch-side mud. It was strange. Like the rite should’ve been spoken in a tongue he didn’t understand. Instead he grasped the words but the meaning behind them was cold, barren, unmeant for him. For all their noise, he hoped the god wasn’t listening. For what he’d planned, he hoped the new laws were right and their god had never been real to begin with.  
  
“For we fight in your name, Great Talos, and the many names you bear! We fight against those who would doom them to silence, and for those who make certain your mighty name rings true and truly remembered round this land that was your mortal home! God-king, warrior-god, accept our warrior’s gifts, as gifts to you and to warriors yet to come. Ysmir, Talos, Stormcrowned and Warthroned, guide us to glory!”  
  
The clamour stopped. The speaker’s voice echoed a moment, out across the valley, then was lost in a wave of thunder. By torchlight, firelight, the bleak sudden scourge of lightning, Simra watched as the worshippers stepped forward one by one and laid something at the statue’s feet. In silence, they each retreated, moved towards the grey-haired woman. They drank from her rain-filled helmet, dipped their fingers, cleaned their hands, annointed their brows and washed their beards and hair. Then they were gone, walking down the gentler path that led back down the headland and into the night.  
  
Simra waited, watching the rain spit and hiss against the bonfire they’d left behind. He was shivering, his breath hitching now, wondering if you could catch the Damp-Lung a second time from trying hard enough.  
  
He thought about counting down, making himself wait a hundred heartbeats before he was sure they were really gone. But counting twists time, stretches it, and he wanted the minutes to flow. He ran backward through the directions that had brought him here, reckoning that would be useful, speeding his return-journey. When he’d walked the imagined way back to the Vahn’s banner, he rose up out of the ditch and clambered leaden over the rocks that led towards the shrine.  
  
Simra cupped his shuddering hands and whispered a weak wan glimmer of magelight into his palm. It floated up, set to tracing small circles above his shoulder: a cold-red firefly, warding off the shadows outside its glow.  
  
The altar at the statue’s feet was stained all the grim colours of dried blood. Like the sodden ground of the Quarter’s lowermost market by the end of Redrunsday. The stain ran russet down the altar’s sides and splotched the idol’s roots. But it was rust, not blood. The crumbled relics of countless iron offerings left the alter mounded, rough, deep red from their long slow shift into uselessness. A helmet, flaked full of holes and caving in. Wood-mulch and driftwoody splinters, left behind by what had once been a shield. But there were other newer offerings too.  
  
Simra looked nervous up at the idol’s weathered face and gushing throat. Real or not, god or not, it wasn’t his god. To him it was just stone. And hadn’t the worshippers said they were gifts to other warriors, as much as to the shrine and its statue? Disgust rose up and overhwelmed his guilt.  
  
“Nothing as senseless as waste,” Simra said.  
  
He knelt by the altar, not to pray, but to open out the sack he’d brought and fill it with things abandoned there. Clanking iron, waterlogged wood, stained steel. It was like ragpicking again. It would help.


	13. Chapter 13

 

 

_I’m getting used to strange patterns of sleep. Used to snatching time for rest when the chance emerges, not according to routine. In the kinds of life most people lead, that’d be a kink in someone’s character. Among soldiers, warriors, travelling types, it’s a skill worth working on._  
  
 _Wasn’t that Vesh’s first scrap of advice to me, before I was signed into the Vahn? ‘I suggest you learn to nap.’ And I have, and I do, and I am, though I’ve still got no tent of my own. I steal sleep in Siska’s, or Vesh’s, or Kjeld’s tents, whenever they’re empty, whenever they’ll let me. Stolen shut-eye in borrowed places. And when I’m awake I’m often tired but near-always busy. The one helps me ride out the other._  
  
 _I walked through the better part of the night, back from the shrine. A rough-cloth sack clinking and scraping over one shoulder, and the single thing that wouldn’t fit inside, carried over the other._  
  
 _It was a sword. A mottled and time-tarnished blade longer than my arm, broadish and taperless along almost its whole length, but with only room for one decent-sized hand on its grip before the big acorn-shaped weight of its pommel. It seemed like a stupid thing to me: too heavy and unwieldy to be swung fast one-handed, except maybe in constant circles, every arc borrowing from the heft of the last. But what do I know of swords or how to swing them? I only reckoned it was made from good steel, and that was what I’d promised Ra’baali._  
  
 _I made the muster-camp again just before dawn. The rain was beginning to clear, but two days of foul wet weather had rinsed away any traces of snow the last few months had left. Cold, soaked to the skin, shoulders aching from heavy carrying. Mind dull and darkening at the edges from a sleepless night of travelling by magelight. I wanted to lie down, rest, get warm, but with no empty tents to creep into, the camp’s central fire was the best I could do._  
  
 _Firecalling’s harder when I’m wearing boots. It helps to feel the dirt under my feet, between my toes. But with the air between my fingers, the breath in my lungs, I can still manage a spark or two. That’s a skill worth working on too, I reckon, though it’d sound stupid if I mentioned it to anyone else — ‘learning to cast fire even when I’ve got proper shoes on!’_  
  
 _The previous night’s campfire was ashes and embers by now. But that was all I needed, really — that and a spark of magic. I crouched by it, sat on my heels. I reached out, stoked up the lingering warmth of the half-dead fire. A glow at first, then hands of flame groping up to warm my own. Fire burning from nearly nothing — just air, the ashes of what it’s already eaten, and the magicka I fed it._  
  
 _Steam rose off my sodden clothes. I sunk the long stupid sword into the mud, propped myself up on its hilt, closed my eyes. Not sleeping. Just letting the magic flow from me, till what little I had left flowed empty._  
  
An axe-head, pried off its haft. Two little knives, single-edged and wedge-nosed at their tips, wooden handles long since rotted off their rusty tangs. The hilt and the blade-beginnings of a sword broken jagged partway down its length. A short iron warhammer, its backward edge shaped wicked into a crows-beak pick. A pair of smithing tongs and a worn ugly spike of a spearhead. A palm-sized scrap of chainmail that had once been stitched with some design or other, but time had made it into nearly nothing. A wrap-around bracer of thin iron splints, backed onto half-rotten cloth.  
  
Simra emptied the sack of salvaged metal onto Ra’baali’s floor. The long-bladed sword followed with a crash. He looked at her as she bent to appraise the pile, checking their weight in her steady hands, testing the materials.  
  
Trying to fix his features into a straight stark bargaining face, Simra was all stillness. Only his right hand wrung and fidgetted, fumbling something on his left wrist. A crude bracelet of bronze wire, twisted and green-tinged. He’d found it wrapped round the broken sword’s grip, but had teased it free, made it into something he thought was pretty.  
  
“Junk,” Ra’baali smiled as she stood.  
  
“Never said it wasn’t,” Simra replied. “What you said’s that we needed iron. Metal. So..!” Arms crossed in front of his chest, he poked out with one boot against the pile. The iron tolled dull, punctuating his point.  
  
“Simra Hishkari speaks the truth,” said Ra’baali raising a hand to stroke the age-lines that hemmed her mouth. “But it will take work…”  
  
“Good thing the Vahn’s got you then, right? You make work happen. Folk might gripe about it, but they do what you tell ‘em. They’ve got to — that’s in the contract too, right?”  
  
“The Vahn has…” she ran a fingernail across her opposite palm, tallying something, “…four smiths. Two are good ones.”  
  
She was warming to the idea. Simra allowed himself the start of a smile. “And any of the rest – what we can’t use outright – we can keep, right? Sell it on when the price suits. I know how the rag-and-bone trade works in Windhelm. Some of this’d fetch – what? – four or five coppers a piece. And with the whole city war-mad as it is, reckon you could say ‘fuck the clink of coppers’, and push for black-iron figures instead.”  
  
“…And how much does Simra Hishkari want for his cut?”  
  
Simra kissed his teeth. “You know what I want, and it ain’t a fucking cut. Arm me. Like my contract said. The fyrd’ll be marching soon, and if we’re lucky we’ll be going with it. I’ll scrub pots, peel all the fucking turnips you want, but I’m not gonna let the Vahn down once steel gets drawn just because the only thing my belt’s holding up’s my trousers, right? A sword’s the least you can do.”  
  
“Ffeh! You wouldn’t know what to do with a sword! Not if your foeman walked onto it for you!”  
  
“Then I’d best get learning, hadn’t I?”  
  
“…Speak to Terez,” Ra’baali said after a weary pause. “Big sword, big boots. Hard to miss. Terez will tell you what to tell Ra’baali.”  
  
“You promise?”  
  
“Do you want Ra’baali to sign a contract?” Simra was noticing that she let slip a ‘you’, a ‘she’, a ‘he’ only when her blood was up. Like formality falling away for a moment. Otherwise everything was named — as if calling things by anything less would cheapen them.  
  
“A contract? Nah, reckon I’m alright. Know how slippery you get with them. Just promise.”  
  
“On Ra’baali’s honour,” she nodded. “Now, there is a dozen eggs that must be taken to Chioma, and someone must tell him we need another bushel of hardybread by sundown, and…”  
  
Simra grabbed the hay-lined basket of eggs and left before Ra’baali could give him any more work to do. He was smiling to himself. The morning was a dry one, though overcast, tin-skied. Like the clouds overhead, things were moving on, changing shape and only time would tell just how. For now though, Terez could wait. Sleep could not.  
  
 _I went to Siska’s tent, coughed loudly, waited till she came out. Mean as she can seem about most things, she’s better with mornings than most of the Vahn. Both of us bleary-eyed on opposite sides of sleep, we mumbled greetings to each other. I asked her about Terez first, edging cautious towards seeing if I could sleep in her tent once she was up and doing._  
  
 _“Terez? Mm. One of the first we got, Terez. Not a recruit so much as she came along when the Vahn was still shitty and scrawny – early days last year, hey? – and said she wanted in. Breton or somesuch. High Rock, anyway. Good with swords, that kind of crowshit. Pretty much any type of sword, far as I’ve seen. Gets greenhorns sent to her. Figures out what’d suit them, hey? Seen her train a few of ‘em too. Got other mercs with skills to share, but Terez has got a lick more patience than most. Not a lot. But a lick more.”_  
  
 _Ra’baali had given me a puzzle earlier. Siska helped me fit the pieces together and got me eager, wanting to be done with sleep, putting in work — learning. But by then I was too threadbare to do much save nod, groan, make eyes at the tent with an asking sort of look on my face._  
  
 _“You asking ‘cos Ra’baali’s sent you for a gumflapping with Terez? Shit…” Siska rasped out a laugh, spat black into the dirt outside her tent. The laugh stayed in her voice as she carried on. “Get in, Sim! Sleep hard! Good fuckin’ luck!”_  
  
 _She slapped me on the shoulder. That’s something she does instead of ever saying goodbye to anyone. And I’m getting better at not cringing away, though the instinct’s still there. She clapped my shoulder and sidled off._  
  
 _I finished the egg dumpling Chioma gave me for breakfast. Offed my boots, draped my tunic out over the top of her tent, then went inside. I think I’ve gotten used to the smell. I think maybe I even find it soothing by now. I slept a deep bone-tired sleep. Maybe a handful of hours. But I woke to the sounds of horns, shouting, running feet._  
  
 _Stumbling, struggling into my tunic again and straining into my mud-stained boots, I hurried round. Mercenaries dashing to and fro. Antolios pulling on a long fancy broider-hemmed coat, buckling on a swordbelt, pacing off brisk with Siska on his tail, both of them talking fierce and fast at each other._  
  
 _For a time I was part of it. A hundred and one kinds of chaos, all trying to piece themselves together into a bigger picture. But eventually, rumour turned to news._  
  
 _Ulfric Stormcloak’s fyrd was mustered, was upping stakes, breaking camp, readying to march south. The horns meant a word was coming out now after so long spent skirting it, dodging it:_  
  
 _War._  
  
 _War in the Rift. Folk seemed careful on that wording. Not ‘war against’ or ‘war on’. Ulfric Stormcloak was going to war in the Rift. And by the murmurs going through the camp now, the quiet smiles of relief, I reckon the Red Vahn will be going too._

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

 

_Soraya’s gang never really had a name of its own. Just her’s – Soraya’s Lot, the Hishkari Gang – muddying the lines between family and dictatorship. I suppose it was always a little of both. After a while Soraya came to like that muddy meaning, but at first she was just lax with names. As slack on wording and naming as I was always keen on both. Once I started reading properly, writing properly, she started saying “Well thanks be for that! Means I’ve never got to learn. I’ve got you, right?”_  
  
_Soraya’s Lot started having initiations long before she had a name for those rites. But by the time my turn came, she’d started calling it The Run. And the rite was about as simple as its name._  
  
_Head uptown with Soraya and some others, pick out a rich prick in the crowd. Pluck their purse or something else as dear, cut and run your way back downtown, to where things clamber up before they drop down into the Quarter’s gorge and Rigs. All the while the others would be running alongside you, or posted along the route. They’d stir up chaos, make a fuss, confuse things and anyone who might be chasing — but they were also there to watch how you did._  
  
_My Run was a close thing. I never was very artful with teasing coats, charming pockets and purses. I managed a bump-and-grab on some fur-collared prick’s silver brooch. Then all Sheogorath’s madness broke loose, set off by Soraya’s girls, as I weaseled through the crowds, towards the streets of the leathermongers and carpenters, then began the frenzied climb towards the stench and alchemy-hot rooftiles of Crucible, then dropped down into safety._  
  
_For all the noise I knew there were Soraya’s Lot, watching and appraising. Junata with her blue-grey mixed-blood eyes. Ilmane, the best climber I’ve ever seen. Sothy, younger than even I was, but initiated sooner. I learnt I wasn’t fond of audiences._  
  
“Ignore them.”  
  
Simra threw his arms down. The morning had been all hefting and tensing, flexing and swinging. Letting his muscles go slack had become a kind of bliss by now and he’d seize that chance where he could. He glanced sidelong at Terez, then turned his body to follow.  
  
“What now?” he said in a long-suffering huff.  
  
“You’re worrying about them.” In two measured strides Terez crossed over to Simra. She thrust him in the chest with two hard-pointing fingers, snorted through her nose when she saw him stumble to crab back his balance. “You worry they’re watching you, and it’s making you think. That’s one. Worse, it’s making you think about how you look. That’s two. And thinking how you look is stopping you from asking yourself, ‘how does this feel?’ That’s three. Ignore them. Or if you can’t, remember you’ll be fighting alongside them soon enough. And just like now, they’ll be able to see you, but they won’t be watching. Just like now, they’ll have better things to do.”  
  
The camp-clearing reeked of charcoal-smoke and hot metal. The muster-camp and Windhelm beyond had smelt that way for months, but now it was close enough to grime the sweat on Simra’s brow and arms, sting the corners of his eyes.  
  
A squat kilnish little forge sat conical on the clearing’s far side, belching black vapour and coughing sparks. Together in sweaty sooty quiet, four smith-skilled mercenaries worked whatever iron the Vahn had scrounged up, helped by shift after shift of short-lived artless assistants. Unshaping and reforging; hammering; quenching and welding; grinding endless edges and burying heat-softened steel. Vesh and a broad-shouldered bear-armed Nord named Lenka, arguing breathless as they took turns heating and working metal. A brown-haired Altmer and Moridene, silent and scowling, as they worked at the whetting-wheel and quenching trough.  
  
That was Simra’s audience. Watching him learn meant watching him fail, at least until he started getting it right.  
  
“Watching or not, didn’t you tell me looking stupid’s the first sign you’re doing something stupid? Something that won’t work?” Simra tore his eyes off the smiths, the other mercenaries milling through the clearing, and turned back to Terez.  
  
She was a small-built, compact Breton, but stood in a way that made her arms and legs seem powerful and precise. Her hair was short-cropped, a ragged recently age-turned shade of steel-grey. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, near-black, set in a long and weathered light-brown face.  
  
“Until you’ve got any skill with a sword, everything you do looks stupid,” said Terez. Thick and dark, her eyebrows and lined forehead made her frown foreboding as thunderclouds.  
  
A flash of embarrassment pained Simra’s face. Sulking, he threw his eyes down to the sword in his hand. A simple thing, room enough on the hilt for just one hand, its full length a little shorter than his arm. It was familiarish: an Eastmarch warrior’s sword in all but its longer blade, the horizontal bar it had for a pommel. It felt heavy, strange-weighted, stupid — or else his arm was all those things, and the sword was just a sword.  
  
“Perhaps,” Terez began again, more gently. “Perhaps my suggestion had you running before you could walk.”  
  
Simra looked up again, took in her foreign dress. A trim dove-grey cloth jerkin fit close to her torso, striped horizontal with blackened leather. The clipped waist and stripes set Simra remembering what Soraya had said about wasps. Sleeveless, it left her arms bare, tanned but hatched with paler scars. Below the jerkin a dusty-yellow sash wrapped her hips, embroidered with a pattern he couldn’t make out except by getting too close for comfort. It held up loose-legged roomy breeches of dark faded-blue cloth, that tucked into tall boots: leathern below the ankle, along the shin and at the knee, but backed onto sturdy narrow-fitting cloth, and held with ties where each thigh began.  
  
“Right,” he sighed, repeating what she’d told him earlier that morning. “We’re not trying to turn me into a swordmaster in three days. Just figuring out what kinda foundations to lay, hm?”  
  
“Not this kind,” Terez said, reaching out to take his sword by the blade, down towards the hilt where the edge was less keen. His fingers loosed and let it go. She balanced it on the palm of her hand, roughly where she’d gripped it. “Not for you. Too long in the blade, too short in the hilt. It wants to be used in one hand – can’t be used in two – but you haven’t got the strength for it in either arm. So you’re slow.”  
  
“…this cloud have a silver lining, at least?” Simra kicked at the ground with a boot-toe.  
  
“Two,” said Terez, with a smile in her voice that didn’t reach her face. “…maybe. This is Skyrim’s sword. Some holds like it shorter, some like a longer rider’s blade, most like their pommels in all different shapes and sizes. A boat or crescent in Eastmarch, a bar in the Reach — the Palings favour a sort of up-ended cloud shape…But this is a Nord’s sword. Poems, songs, sagas make a lot of Nords too proud of their swords – their forebears’ swords – to realise they suit them not at all. They’re slow too, or else they fight without the shield this really needs by its side. You know that now, and they don’t, and that’s an edge you have on them. That’s one.”  
  
“And two?” A smile inched its way onto Simra’s face. There were Nords out there, playing at warriors and making bigger fools of themselves than he was. How much of an idiot could he really be, by comparison?  
  
“You’re a mage, correct? So no shield for you, and nothing that will absolutely require two hands, I think. But a strict one-hander like this,” she tossed the Nordic sword onto the groundsheet outside her tent. It rang against the others they’d already tried, “it’d leave you too slow to attack and too weak to parry. But with just enough room for another hand toward the pommel, you’d be quick enough on the cut, strong enough on the parry, but could hold and thrust one-handed, leave your other one free for any finger-wiggling you need to do.”  
  
Excitement had pitched into her voice, speeding it. Usually stark and measured, she was gleeful now, inspiring. She showed her teeth as she talked with dancing eyes. Her enthusiasm was catching.  
  
“The Legions, they armed their battlemages with something like that for a while. Lovely gentle-tapered blades — straight, not too short, not too long, three deep fullers. Middling length to the hilt, and a guard made of rings and curves, like a steel flower. Quick as a hawk in swoop in the right hands, but still liable to kick like a mule in just one. Beautiful things…”  
  
“That sounds…pretty.” Simra faltered, coughed, corrected himself. “Good. Pretty good. Where’d I get one of those?”  
  
“Oh, damn me to the daedra if I know. They don’t – uh – don’t forge them anymore, and they weren’t common to start with. Unlikely either one of us will ever see one. Unless Ulfric Stormcloak finds himself fighting the Legions, and they call in the veterans!” Terez gave a laugh. It was the first of hers Simra had heard: an uneasy thing, half-choked. With it her voice tailed into silence.  
  
It left Simra feeling cheated at first. He’d caught a glimpse of treasure, wanted it till it looked like destiny, then had it snatched back and away into myth. It was too good for him — another fine thing his life was never meant to contain. After anger came resignation. Simra worried at the insides of his palms, sharp indented with his fingernails: vulnerability, clenched inside a fist.  
  
“Shit,” he finally said. “So what’s next? What’s the real world got to offer?”  
  
“This.”  
  
Terez came up from her groundsheet once more. What she held was an ugly illegitimate thing, somewhere between a short sword and a long knife. The blade was wide and heavy, perhaps roughly as long as the distance from Simra’s elbow to the tips of his fingers. The grip was simple wood, bolted either side of the metal tang. It curved a little downward towards the knotty cudgel of its pommel, curved up a little more at the blade’s far end, towards the broad sudden clip of its point. It had one cutting edge, one guard jutting out like a short-broken tusk where blade met hilt.  
  
“Try it,” she said, handing it to Simra, hilt-first.  
  
The grip was smooth under his fingers, sturdy and grim. He swung it, stepping into the first kind of cut Terez had shown him. It was a movement meant for hewing someone, down through the shoulder to the hip. With this blade in hand, ‘hew’ felt like it was the right word. He tried again, finding room for his second hand at the pommel, used the step and swivel of his hips this time.  
  
“How is it?” asked Terez, hands on her hips.  
  
“I…” he began, trying to think. She was watching. Maybe the others were too. But for a moment Simra had forgotten them all. “It’s heavy but not slow. Brutal but not stupid. Ugly as anything, but—…”  
  
“It’s a cleaver,” Terez shrugged. “We call it a falchion in Jehenna, a fakone as you go further west. Here it’s a messer, I think. But they’re all big words for something simple and nasty. It slices through meat like a kitchen-knife, then breaks bones like a club.”  
  
“Why this? You said the last one was too heavy for me, right? This is heavier.”  
  
“It’s…a different kind of weight. A different balance. It’s all there.” She flicked the broad head of the sword with a fingernail. It gave a dull chime. “Like muscle, I think? So you don’t need as much.”  
  
“I reckon it’ll do,” said Simra.  
  
“It will,” said Terez, unsmiling. “It will do its job tolerably, so you can do the same. For now, that’s what the Vahn needs. Not necessarily good but good enough. So, tell Ra’baali that’s what you’re borrowing. She’ll get you a sheathe and belt for it.”  
  
“Wait. You’re gonna teach me to use it, right?”  
  
“With spells and a little luck, I hope you’ll hardly need to.”  
  
“But I will, won’t I? If I don’t really know how, that’s when I’ll end up having to fall back on this. And it’ll get me fucking killed. That’s how luck works.”  
  
“There’ll be time on the road,” Terez sighed.  
  
“Is that a yes?”  
  
“It’s not a promise.”  
  
“Not good,” grinned Simra. “But good enough.”  
  
He brought the heavy blade to the quartermaster’s tent. Outside, the Vahn was loading carts, packing bags, forging spearheads and fletching arrows. No-one was ready. Not quite. Perhaps it was alright if he wasn’t either.

 


	15. Chapter 15

 

 

_Some people go most of their lives not seeing their own face. That is, never seeing it clear. Just ripples in black water. Maybe a twisted version of things, seen through the scuff of a polished copper dish, a burnished pewter plate. Most don’t have the money for a proper rich-prick’s silverbacked mirror, or the magic for a spell of self-seeing or an enchantment that’ll let them do the same._

_Growing up, that was one of the few ways I was lucky. My mother had a bowl made from shell. Its convex edge was rough and ugly and dark, but the inside was like rainbow-chased silver. It had a small enchantment on it. Fill it with water, say a handful of words – ‘eyes to see as others see,’ I think, in my mother’s tongue – and the water would shimmer over. It would gleam a moment, then show your face, your hair, bright and clear as any mirror._

_But of course I didn’t steal it in leaving. And I don’t know the enchantment or how to work it into a bowl of my own. And I’ve gone nearly two weeks without properly seeing my face. I can feel the fading bruises round my eye and lip, but don’t know their colours. The rest’s all guesswork and remembering. And that bothers me._

Night was falling across the muster-camp. Pale dead grass lay flat to the ground where tents had stood and since upped stakes. Trenches furrowed the earth, scarred muddy where wagons had wheeled their way free. The camp was caving in on itself, coming apart at the edges. Much of it had already fallen away over the last few days, blown south like leaves on the wind.

Simra looked out across the flattish spread of riverbank and valley. Campfires burnt in the gathering dark, but they were far fewer than before. Figures moved ghoulish between them and the remaining tents, treading paths that travel had since turned to mires. The weather wasn’t cold enough anymore to freeze the mud hard. Together it looked more like a battlefield with every passing hour. Or else what Simra imagined a battlefield might look like, after the battle was done.

He tried to follow familiar tracks but they’d been widened, twisted into meanders. The old landmarks were gone. Staring through the smoky dark, he went by sight instead. There was less to see now, but less still to bar off seeing. He veered away across the wasteland, towards cluster after scattered cluster of wagons and tents.

Soon it would all be gone.

Many would head Riftwards with the fyrd, as so many already had — as the Vahn was preparing to do. The other rejected free-companies would dissolve, move on. Or they’d go to ground in the hills and headlands, Kjeld had said darkly. They’d turn bandit and plague Eastmarch while its fighters were away, until Spring began and brought raiding-season, and they could sell their swords once more.

As for the merchants, they’d followed, or sank back into the city, or filtered off down other roads. There’d been markets, packs of peddlers, rows of food-vendors. Those that remained were desperate, looking to lighten their loads and burden their purses before travelling on. Simra had pinned small hopes on that, setting out in the muster-camp’s last hours, looking for a something particular.

An unfamiliar weight hung at his side. It was the falchion – a borrowed blade in a stiff loaned leather sheathe – jury-rigged onto the tough colourless cloth of his sash. It moved too much if left unchecked, bashing flat against the backs of his legs, the side of his thigh in rhythm to his walking. Simra kept it still with a resting hand on its pommel. Quietly he liked having the right to do so: wearing weapons in the open, even in bow-shot of Windhelm.

“This bracers, friends! This bracer, though unassuming, bear a powerful enchantment!” A hawker called out across the riverbank in muddled patchwork accent. “An Infusion of Fast-Learning, friends! Yet not the learning of books and scrolls, but the battlefield. A warrior’s study! Turn a promising knack into true knowledge in a matter of days! Become the soldier you were meant to be, sooner! Yours, maestra? Or yours, serjo!”

The hawker had singled Simra out, bustling over from their mat of trinkets and nothings to clap a hand on his shoulder. He was a small olive-skinned man, round-faced, with a grinning merish cast to his eyes. Dressed in a particoloured coat – one side mustard-yellow, the other waning crimson – he nodded, shaved scalp glinting in the firelight, jowls bobbing vigorously.

“Yours,” he repeated. “Yours, young master, for only six-hundred drakes! Though I will accept of course your thalers, your sikka, your zheri and – yes! – even your Nordic shillings. I do not discriminate — all silver is good silver, friends!”

Simra glanced at the man once and not again, walking on.

“Did I say six-hundred?” The man hurried close again, talking in a stage-whisper. “A price for fools and rich children in want of toys, young master. You, being a clever one, shall have it for five-hundred..! Four-fifty? Four-hundred-thirty drakes, friend – four and a half of your fine Nordic shillings – and that is my final offer!”

“If you’re not selling mirrors or mirroring charms,” said Simra, “I’m not playing coy. I’m just not fucking interested, how’s that for a final offer?”

“Filth!” The hawker had stopped, spat on the ground in Simra’s wake. “Purse-strings tighter than a dog’s arsehole, this one! Be warned,” he called out to anyone who’d listen. “Be warned!”

“Might be insulted,” Simra called back, looking straight ahead. “If I wasn’t so worried by how much you know about dog’s arseholes!”

“Copperskate scum! Grey-filth! I shit on the bones of your ancestors and piss the ashes to paste..!”

Simra gave a stiff-lipped grimace. Soon the hawker’s curses were left behind, sinking beneath the background-noise. The gulley-bottom markets of the Grey Quarter were worse by far. They’d taught Simra to be thick-skinned and sharp-tongued. By now he knew this dance all too well. A series of masks to wear, roles to perform, lies to tell and truths to let slip. Money in his purse and a sword by his side put a weight of confidence in them all.

He stepped over a trench of rotting refuse, rounded an abandoned wicker shelter, and veered into another enclave of over-eager peddlers. A Bosmer matron and her two grovelling males tried to sell him a set of spoons, a suite of ivory hairpins. A tall white-haired old Nord, propped up on a loggish totem-carved staff offered runestones for luck and fame in return for the thin jangle of copper in his palm. Simra stopped outside a single-poled tent of rain-washed indigo, night-dark in the gloom. He ducked in.

“Spells?” he asked, blunt but not harsh. “Enchantments?”

“Fortunes told in tea-leaves,” came the answer from inside. “Grinds of coffee too, in better times and on better trade-routes.”

A thin Redguard woman sat cross-legged on a mat. Her pale-green eyes looked out from a face whose age was hard to tell. A small cloud of twisting curls crowned her head. She wore a long pale-bleached shift with a loose deep collar, a hoodlike shawl over her shoulders.

“Charms and charmed things too,” she added quickly. “Sit. Take tea. I’ll tell you my wares in good time.”

“Thank you,” said Simra, “I’ll stand. I’m looking for something particular. Needn’t stay long if you don’t carry the right sort of thing, hm?” The woman wrinkled her nose, gave him a half-impatient look. Simra carried on. “Self-seeing spells, mirroring enchantments. Anything like that?”

“Mmmh. In truth? No. Nothing so exact.” She sounded calm, apologetic — but not so desperate as the others.

“Anything else?”

“Staying after all?” She gave a brief pleased smile. “Cast cantrips, do you? A traveller, or soon to be travelling? I have some cantrips might suit you…”

She seemed more grateful for the company than the business. Whatever the cause, the prices she gave were kinder. And whatever caused Simra to be kind won him two scraps of paper, each scrawled with a small spell. One to ask water if it was safe to drink, the other a small ritual to make the caster mostly clean except a scent of rainwater.

“How’d I know they’re real?” Simra asked.

“This place is a swamp. Miles of hungry mud, stubborn dirt. Do you see a speck on me? Of course, the spell doesn’t clean you as well as an hour at a bath-house. But it’ll get you scrubbed as good as you’ll get on the road. Then again, if you have a bit of amber – and I just so happen to be selling some—”

He bought both spells for an iron penny and an Imperial copper bull, but declined the amber. With both scraps of paper folded into the pages of his journal, Simra carried on.

The stars were out now, in stripes and swathes between swaddlings of dark cloud. At firstlight, Siska had said, the Vahn would be heading off to follow the fyrd. Simra began the way back to his camp. He should sleep. No means for now to see his face clearly, but he’d know at least it was clean. He’d traded vanity for decency, he reckoned, and that seemed a good exchange. As good as knowledge in return for coin — a pittance really, for as much magic as his mother had taught him in four years.

Meanwhile, the night was growing cold. A snatch of song began somewhere, then shyly snuffed itself out. A low wind keened on the struts of shucked off shelters. Like an echo, the trees still standing on the wooded hillside replied in the breeze.

“Simra..? Simra Hishkari..?”

Simra twisted round, glanced over one shoulder then the other, chasing after the voice. There was nothing to see. The hillside was beginning to fog from the treeline down. Shadows crawled in the foreground, silhouettes in the distance. Something was wrong, said the rise in his throat, the prickle down the back of his neck. Simra’s right hand passed across his body, swapped in for the left on the hilt of his sword. Ready to draw steel, or just to draw strength? He turned a circle, scanning the gloom.

A paper-dry grip about his right wrist. It yanked hard – painful – pulled his right arm up, under his left and backward. His torso twisted, stretched into knots across the chest. His right shoulder strained, creeched out. Then the grip closed on his other hand, pulling them together, painful behind him.

Simra gave a yelping bark. Surprise and pain. The sword was out of its sheathe one moment, hanging useless from his loosening fingers one moment, then dropped in the mud. The breath in his ear was a calm long-drawn hiss. The voice that called his name had been a stranger’s. He cried out wordless first. Pain and pleading anger. Not like in a dream. He had a voice.

“Help! Someone—!”

“Another sound,” the voice hissed, “and I cut your throat. Deliver you dead. Understand?”

Metal pressed cold against Simra’s neck. Not an edge but a point. Three points. Hopeless. The fight had gone from him before it could spark. He tried not to whimper. The weight of someone taller than him – a hissing voice and hissing threat – bore him down. They made his knees buckle, pressing his face down into the chill and the grit till he tasted dirt on his lips. Rough rope snaked tight round the twist of his wrist. Trussed on the floor, Simra heard them step back, breathing all too even and all too easy.

“HEY!”

The sound started brief and metallic, a slide and crack, then an awful understatement of a wet-parting noise. A raw-throated scream followed. Then the thud and pound of punches, kicks.

“Hey — you nettle-dicked — shit-kickin’ — slop-gobblin’ — son-of-a — biscuit-eatin’ —”

Simra rolled painfully onto his back, writhing against the bindings on his wrists. The dark made seeing difficult, but the voice and the words were enough to tell by.

“Moridene!” he gasped, thoughts blind with questions.

Her smaller shadow was kicking, stamping, punching down against a large quivering shape beneath it. Simra’s back was tensing, tying into knots and hurting. The other shape fell stillish and silent a moment, except for pained hissing breath.

“Blood and fucking bones, Moridene!” Simra cried hoarsely. “Stop stropping on ‘em for one fucking instant and—…My hands. Please? Oh thanks-fucking-be…”

She’d bent down next to him, rough-tilted him over, undid the bindings on his wrists. Simra brought them round to the front of his body, sighing roughly as the pain ebbed and he swiped muck from his mouth and eyes. He mumbled a magelight into his hands. Its cold glow spilt about them as Simra clambered aching to his feet.

Moridene edged a little away. Her hair hung wilder than usual, in difficult strands and tangles, chased with the startings of sweat. Simra’s borrowed falchion dangled heavy in her right hand, dark-smeared with blood. She eyed Simra sidelong, moving round the other shape on the ground.

A mud-caked brown and yellow scaled Argonian writhed there. He let out a yowling honking half-strangled shriek from some organ in his chest neither Simra nor Moridene had or knew existed. He was balled partway in on himself, cradling his right arm. Blood oozed up between the shaking fingers of his left hand.

Shoving the bloodied sword into Simra’s grasp, Moridene bent, leaning on her knees. For a moment, a straggling sheet of hair covered her face. She was panting.

“Shit,” she grumbled under her breath, stretching the word into two syllables. “Didn’t so much as get the whole way through his arm an’ he’s keening like a kitten…”

Simra’s shock began to fade. Pride boiled up to fill the breach. He lowered the clipped point of his sword at the Argonian. On the ground, he filled his lungs to let go another wail. Simra spoke first:

“Deliver me to who?” Simra punctuated the question with a prod to the ribs. The Argonian looked up with wide golden eyes. “You said ‘deliver me dead’. Who wants me delivered? Who wouldn’t mind me delivered fucking dead, you broken bit of—”

“Shattershield! He—…he paid me!”

Simra kissed his teeth. “That fucking figures…” He wound up and threw all the torque and weight of his body into a kick to the henchman’s jaw. A crack. The Argonian fell silent and still except for the shallow wheeze of his ragged breathing. “And you..!” Simra turned on Moridene.

“‘Thank you,’” she said, straightening up. “Would those be the words you’re looking for?”

“You were following me! Why were you fucking following me?”

“First things first,” she broadened her stance, cocked one hip. “Manners! You don’t get to ask me for buzzard-spit nothin’ till you grow some, Simra Hishkari!” Moridene swaggered forward till inches divided her face from his. “For all we know I just saved your runty little life!” She shoved him full in the chest.

For a glimpse of a moment, Simra’s arms were wheeling. Then the breath was knocked out of him. He’d fallen hard on his arse, dropping the falchion again, scowling before he hit the ground. Moridene cawed with laughter, throwing her head back, one arm clutched round her belly.

“Bless your heart,” she crowed between gasps of air. “How is it every time I say a word to you, you end up acquittin’ yourself like such absolute shit! I think I’d slap you stupid if only you weren’t so pathetic…”

Simra’s face was ablaze with blushing, hidden beneath a mask of mud. A line of slim pain had broken out somewhere on his neck. He raised his fingers to where it hurt and they came away brightly red. “I am not thanking you for saving my blighted life,” he growled.

“O-ho! Just like I’m not telling you Ra’baali told me to follow you round on your errands, make sure you didn’t cut and run with her cleaver before we march tomorrow morning.” She grinned a leery grin. “Looks like if you did then it wouldn’t of been your fault anyhow…”

Simra grovelled up from where he’d sat down, moved to kneel by the knocked-out Argonian. The pain in his neck was turning into a ragged-cutting throb, worsening with time. He began to pat down the Argonian, palming a small clay bottle, yanking free a necklace of teeth gummed into silver settings. But Simra was tired. And dimly aware he was grumbling something to himself as he picked over the shallow-breathing body. Then he slumped into darkness.

 


	16. Chapter 16

 

 

_This morning I woke to a blazing-bright sky. Beneath me the world to’d and fro’d like the yaw of a boat on impatient waters. The air was finegrained with dust, turned up by the tramp of feet. Mules brayed, goats belled as they walked. The not-quite-iron sound of horseshoes against packed dirt._   
  
_For all the light and sound, the air was still cold. Not muffled with snow except what clings to the hills and hoards itself into the land’s cracks and stony creases. But still tight and keen and brisk with a Sun’s Dawn chill._   
  
_I was swaddled up in canvas, covering me more like a collapsed ship-sail than bedclothes or blankets. But under the cloth I was twisted and stiff from the way I’d slept. Crammed into the back of a wagon, bucking its way down an ill-kept road. My body was fit amongst barrels, crates, lumpen sacks, and had misshapen itself between them. Mattocks and shovels, barrels of salted fish, bags of parched grain and bristling bundles of tent-poles. I took them in, mind not yet working quick or clear._   
  
_Worry dawned on me. I sprawled, fretting and full of questions. My bags, my things — I struggled in the cloth and canvas, like learning to swim all over again. I found my satchel and gathersack, the awkward length of my borrowed sword, heaped in on top and around me. But my limbs were gelid and distant-feeling. A few moments’ thrashing and searching had worn me out till I felt ready to sleep again. And I think I did for a while, drifting awake and asleep to the wagon’s trundle, the pitch of the road._   
  
_When my eyes opened again, I saw I had company in the wagon. An Altmer sat on a barrel by my side, looking down at me, frowning._   
  
_“Clovis,” he said, nodding down at me. He extended a hand, pulled it back before I could react. “My name is Clovis. We met in the night, but I don’t think you’ll remember.”_   
  
_Even seated he was tall, worried painfully thin. Oldish, I suppose, but ageless in a way most mer lean towards but never quite reach, while Altmer wend their way there like it’s a fated thing — part of their nature. The corners of his face though were lined, like the webby cracks that form in ancient pottery. His crown was scraped to a downing of stubble till halfway back along his scalp. From there his dark-bronze hair was gathered into a long braid, tossed forward over one shoulder to reach partway down his chest. When he spoke, his voice was weary but his talking was skittish. Like a hare hunted so hard for so long that its senses have sharpened to straining point. By the look on his face, everything seemed to worry him._   
  
_“I’m the Vahn’s healer,” he said. I realised he wasn’t quite looking at my face but just past it, not meeting my eye. “Other things besides, but you don’t need a shave and all your teeth seem to be behaving themselves so – ah – for you I think I’m just the healer.”_   
  
_I groaned then spoke. “Suppose I’m lucky I’ve not had any reason to meet you till now, then…”_   
  
_“I suppose you are. Lucky on several counts, I think. The venom on that knife, for one. Cheap stuff – badly factored and mixed – but almost kind as far as toxins go. Canisroot extract, spadescales. A sleeping draught. Something to knock you out, make you limp as a puppet, easy to carry. I should think that’s why Moridene had as little trouble with you as she did.”_   
  
_“Moridene?” I said groggily, through gritted teeth. I remembered vaguely. We quarrelled. My faint gave her the upper hand._   
  
_“She carried you – or dragged you maybe – back to camp. Kicked up such a fuss that I was woken and came running.”_   
  
_“Crowshit,” I muttered to myself. I might have said more but my throat closed, like it had been frozen partway through a hacking cough. Eyes watering, I tapped at my neck, then pawed and clawed. I couldn’t breathe._   
  
_“Mmh,” said Clovis. “Tightened airways? One of the after-effects. Like I said — cheap alchemy. It will pass. Try to breathe slowly, relax.”_   
  
_“Slow. Fast. Can’t fucking breathe at all,” I gasped half-silent and choking. But as Clovis said, the after-effect waned after a few pained seconds had passed._   
  
_“That’s the catalyst, binder, medium to the poison, I think. Your body will neutralise them given time, but they’ll run their course first. You’ll have aches to contend with. Muddled thinking and memories, weakness from the bottom of your ribcage down. But the primary effect is mostly used up, I think?”_   
  
_“Awake aren’t I?” I grumbled._   
  
_Clovis leaned over me, reached out a long arm. I stiffened but let him tilt my chin back with a long finger as he frowned at the nick by my throat, where the poison (or venom?) got in._   
  
_“How’s it look?” I asked._   
  
_“Ugly, in all honesty. The wound looks worse than you feel, I should think. Starting to yellow. But I cleaned it, and I’ll clean it again in time, so the risk of infection should be negligible. Very impressive, Simra. At least to the easily impressed. Now…” He got up, made towards the rear of the wagon._   
  
_“You’re going?”_   
  
_“There’s no need for stitches, and my bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired. What’s there to keep me? Just stay still, rest, try not to eat or drink too much. You’ll want to slow your body to slow the after-effects — have them let you down gently. All said, believe me, some of our comrades in arms travelling on foot have hangovers more immediately threatening than your poisoning.”_   
  
_He hopped down onto the road, walked back along our column._   
  
_I craned my neck and tried to sit up, watching him go. The twenty-something contractors under the Vahn trudged haphazard down the road. Spears and axe-hafts, thrown over shoulders, weighted with travelsacks. Packmules led by their bridle-bits, hawing against the weight of our arms, armour, supplies._   
  
_Turning, I looked into the drover’s seat of the wagon. Ra’baali sat in patient slouched silence, urging on a pair of sturdy shaggy-maned horses. Antolios walked at the head of the column, Siska and Shora by the side of the cart. I saw a familiar thick-heathered kind of hillside risen on each side. We were already beyond the tree-lined southern horizon of Windhelm. Already out of view and getting further with each wheelturn, each long-suffering step._   
  
_Riding in the cart, not walking alongside, has given me time to think. Too much, maybe. I’ve spent the afternoon piecing things together, pondering the rest…_   
  
_Shattershield wanted revenge, not justice. And I’d made sure to scriv him into a situation that meant he was as much a criminal as me. Conspiring to dodge the hold’s taxes and tariffs for personal gain. Paying me to help him do it. Cheating his suppliers. Smuggling too, if you look at the ledger I left, in the right light and from the right angle._   
  
_I was careful to make sure he couldn’t go to the watch or the guards once he realised I’d gouged him. But I was stupid too. Torbjorn Shattershield’s a heady mix of rich and crooked — I should’ve known he’d be just as willing to buy himself some underhand payback as he was to lap up my underhand profits. And I should’ve known he’d reach beyond Windhelm’s walls just as easy._   
  
_It doesn’t do to dwell on what Shattershield had in mind after I was delivered to him. But instead some grim-curious part of me’s stuck wishing I hadn’t knocked his hired hand silent without asking what he’d been paid upfront, what he’d been promised for a done job. I want to know my price. Is that strange?_   
  
_No matter. That ember’s ashes now. Behind me? Maybe. At least Windhelm is. It’s not the first time I’ve left it behind, but it feels different from before. I’m not confused. Not running from something and chasing it too. I’m following a choice I made and hopes I had. Have. This adventure is not an accident._   
  
_And then there’s the matter of Moridene. It’s hard to admit – harder still to even think about admitting to her – but I owe her. She followed me. I don’t like the order she was given but the fact that she obeyed it saved my hide. She’s the reason I woke up where I did — not alone, abandoned in a sea of trench-churned mud._   
  
_Clearly, the wagon’s also given me time to write. Even through tricky breathing, hands that shake then stop and fall still, weak legs, inkbolts that swim in the corners of my vision. Clovis wants the after-effects to let me down gently? I’d rather get them over and done with. Get done what I can, get out of this cart — carry my own weight and stop up Ra’baali’s hourly glances back at me, like she’s pulling the extra bulk I’ve added to her wagon personally, not just guiding the horses._

 


	17. Chapter 17

 

 

Not only a place to keep passing days, pressed between the pages like dried flowers, but a thing to keep knowledge in. A grimoire, a workbook, as well as a journal. Simra liked that comparison. With the journal’s leather covers folded secretive as a sleeping bat’s wings, he reckoned at least it looked the part.  
  
He finished copying the two scraps of spell into it. Writing carefully, making the lines even and the script halfway pretty, it took time. But he had plenty of that, riding in the wagonback, propped against a cask of strongbeer. First the spell for asking water if it was clean and safe or not. Next the spell to wash without washing. He wanted that one fresh and sharp in his mind.  
  
The struggle was fixed now as his last memory of the muster-camp. It had left him with a crust and scudding of mud on his skin. Like the place wouldn’t let him go without leaving its mark. The chill metallic sunlight made the dirt itch wrong and seemless on his skin. Moridene had been right about one thing: Simra had been mudcaked most of the time since joining the Vahn. It hadn’t stopped bothering him, but the bother had slipped backwards, pawing dumb distraction at the rear wall of his brain.  
  
Reading the cantrip one last time, Simra began. He clambered to an awkward kneel, sitting on the backs of his shanks, and took Siska’s second gift from his piled possessions. The waterskin was slack, not yet dry but far from full. Enough though for what the spell needed. He poured a little out into the cupped palm of his left hand. With his right he dipped three fingers into the water, drew them in vertical lines down his face, cold across his closed eyelids, down his dirt-daubed cheeks. Repeat. Once, twice, three times. Then he brought his hands together, rubbed the water into his palms, over his fingers, cleaning gravely as he spoke six words in a language he didn’t recognise.  
  
Nothing.  
  
He tried again. And again nothing. Under the damp-smeared dirt on his face, Simra was blushing hotly. The tips of his ears burnt as he muttered to himself. “Lying sack of rotten…shit shit fucking…stupid oh you stupid blighted…” Growling, sighing, huffing, he ran out of breath and fell silent.  
  
It wasn’t trust for the woman who’d sold him the spell that kept his faith in it and made him try again. More like distrust in himself. He was doing it wrong, must be. His first time trying anything but ashlander magic — why should it come easy? But he wanted it to. To be talented at something, just for once. He wanted that nearly as much as he wanted to believe he hadn’t wasted the black penny and the bull he’d spent on two spells. That and the ink and parchment he’d spent on scribing them out. Waste. The word terrified him, set a keening whine in the back of his throat as he furrowed his brow and tried once more.  
  
The sky gloomed over. Somewhere the sun was setting, but it was hidden behind the heathered hills that cleaved up on both sides of the track. Voices grumbled about stopping for the night as they dragged their feet. Voices complained about bootsores and pack-aching shoulders. The Vahn’s column carried on.  
  
Simra thought to himself. What was he putting into the spell to make it work? Nothing besides a hard-thinking strain behind his eyes, and the dogma over doing it the same each time. He tried to think how Firecalling felt: the upwelling and flow, the torrent and catch of it as he hauled up something from inside him and made it want to be set free. That was magicka, wasn’t it? And without that, the cantrip was just superstition.  
  
It wasn’t a matter of thinking this time. Simra reached down into the strange non-space beneath his lungs, feeling for what gave life to flames and light when he cast them like his mother had shown him. There it was — like something murmuring; like the slow breathing of a sleeping cat; the glower of a coal left from last night’s fire. He yearned at it, gathered it in his hands and in the pooling of water. He felt it tingling on his lips as he spoke the words and finished the spell.  
  
There was a sound that was a little like wind gnawing at stones. But even without, Simra would’ve known it had worked. He felt it this time: the outpouring of letting go what he’d gathered up. A shower of dryish flakes fell from him like shedding a skin, shard by shard. A cloud of dustmotes rose up from his hair and left it pale, not dun.  
  
And that was all. His face was road-dusty perhaps but mostly clean. He edged his nose under the collar of his tunic, under his scarf, and smelt only a stony rainy light-grey scent. His clothes were still stained dark and smeared with mud in places, but under them he was clean.  
  
“Ha!” he cried out loud, then gnashed his teeth together into an almost painful grin. He fell to a chuckling that rumbled in his chest, churred in his throat. His journal was a grimoire, he was a mage, and his hair and face and the whole of his hide were all clean. The night sky seemed warmer, the call of unseen birds either playful or triumphant. “Fucking ha!”  
  
Ra’baali looked back at him over one shoulder, dour-faced and withering. “Really?” she muttered, then turned away, looking ahead down the road. “And the Vahn thought it was hiring a jo’renrij. Not a ja’thjiz playing with sugar-sparklers in the back of Ra’baali’s cart…” She tailed off muttering a string of half-hearted curses to herself in her own tongue.  
  
It hardly mattered to Simra. Travel seemed to wear Ra’baali raw, make her feral and bristly. For now he could bear up beneath her brunt. Nothing could dent his pride.  
  
The column came to a stop, then veered off the road and into a small copse of stunted bare-branched shrubs. The Vahn settled in for the night. Ra’baali yowled orders, smoothing the process in her prickly way, as her cart and the few others were hauled into a barricade, clumsying the way from the road.  
  
Even riding the late-trailing fringes of the venom’s after-effects, Simra couldn’t dodge her commands. He lit three fires, went to Chioma to help soak hardybread, water down strongbeer, and stir the steaming pot of goat and dried broad-peas as it stewed. Foragers went out, found herbs that Chioma added or saved in his stores as he told Simra their names. He wrote them down.  
  
 _Anoragon. Rosemary. Mistlespring. All good with goat, mutton, lamb, though maybe not all at once. Choose two and hold._  
  
When the time come to fill bowls, distribute bread and biscuits, Simra was wolfish-hungry. Clovis be damned, if eating hearty would hasten the toxins out of him, he’d eat for two men twice his size.  
  
The night was full of singing. Simra was just pleased that it was dry. He lay his bedroll in the bole of a tree, bigger at root than branch, and tried to ignore his swimming vision, aching joints, shuddering sudden-cold hands. Soon it would be done with. That was a comforting thought. He’d never had much patience for illness.

 


	18. Chapter 18

 

 

_The poison passed and took its blighted echo-effects with it. A night of absolute misery, and then it was gone. I’ve always found the first instant of being well again strange after a stint of illness. Like I’ve forgotten what it’s like for my body to fall silent — no complaints. The comfortable nothing of complacency. Briefly it’s bliss before it becomes normal._  
  
 _My right to ride in the wagonback left with my symptoms. Smirking and crowing, Ra’baali turned me out onto the road with the rest of the sign-ons. She framed it like a punishment. For slacking maybe, or for being stupid enough to have been almost-captured, and getting away lucky with a mild poisoning instead. But quietly I was glad of it. Walking and carrying my own weight now, when the wagon had grown boring to the brink of madness._  
  
 _I half-recognise the land. We’re skirting along the edges of what I remember. The fringes of the Eastmarch saltflats, heading south this time, along the western bank of the Darkwater River. I came nearly this way with my mother, a year ago if not to the day. But then I wasn’t following so much as I was being led, back to Windhelm, and the way things had always been. Now I’m chasing my own accord._  
  
 _Kjeld reckons it’s ten days’ travel from Windhelm to where Eastmarch ends and the Rift begins. Ten days for a few folk on foot, weighted for light-travel and in good weather, walking dawnish till near enough sundown. But we’re nearly thirty, in a column of carts, many of us travelling with wargear and a small herd of goats to keep in line. Compared with the fyrd we’re lightning-quick and reckoned to catch it up any day now. But by any one traveller’s reckoning we’re slow as snow-thaw in Skyrim Springtime._  
  
 _All the same. A week? Ten days? Two weeks? Soon we’ll leave the hold I’ve known all my life. And every step in my sturdy leather boots brings me closer._  
  
“The Rift?” Kjeld scritched under his bearded chin, shifted the shieldstrap on his shoulder. “Why d’you want to know about the Rift now?”  
  
“You mean ‘now’ rather than later? Or why’d I want to know at all?” Simra snorted a small laugh through his nose. “You questioning why I’m asking, or the time I’ve chosen to do it?”  
  
Kjeld’s talk moved like a snake or a river does: by twisting, meandering, bending back on itself. Simra had learnt to like mimicking it, teasing the red-bearded Kreathing with a taste of his own medicine. Simra walked next to him, Shora quiet on Kjeld’s far side.  
  
“It’s where we’re going isn’t it?” Simra continued. “If we’re going to be fighting anyone, we’ll be fighting Riftfolk, right?”  
  
 _“Know your enemy,” Kjeld agreed slowly. “If that’s your reason then, aye, that’s one I can respect.”_  
  
 _“And seeing as how I know shit-all about any of it – Rift or Riftfolk – any start’s a good one, right?”_  
  
 _Kjeld thought for a moment. The sounds of travel filled his silence. The creak of leather and cartwheels, the tromp and tromp of feet._  
  
 _“Hair,” said Shora. She spoke first, glancing quick as a bird round Kjeld’s right arm, then disappearing again. “Riftfolk. They’ve got strange hair.”_  
  
 _Kjeld let go a brief surprised bellyful of laughter. “That they do, kit! They do indeed.” He turned to Simra, explaining. “It’s darker than most in Skyrim, that much is true, but stranger still’s how they keep it. Short to the skin everywhere but the uppermost crown of their heads. No beards to speak of.” He ran his hands through his own thick side-tied hair in mime of a razor. “The men, they keep a forelock flops forward to their brows or else off to one side. The women wear it a little longer, braided usually, down from the tops of their heads. But there’s more to the Rift and Riftfolk than odd hair, isn’t there now?”_  
  
 _Shora nodded, eyes downcast like she’d been scolded. “Horses,” she said._  
  
 _“Horses,” Kjeld agreed, suddenly serious. “Horses and folk who ride them. Now it’s not that Nords don’t ride for the most part. Those who can afford a riding-horse will use the beast to the purpose it’s been bred for. But what they ride are big thick-shanked fleecy things, made for cold and mountain-climbing. A Nord may ride to war but when the battle begins he fights on his feet. The Riftmen are different, strange to most of Skyrim. They breed these sleek surefooted little ponies – so many of them that nearly every Riftman with two coppers to rub together has one – and they travel and fight from the saddle.”_  
  
 _“That sounds…” Simra’s jaw moved, lips closed, as if chewing the idea over. He’d almost said ‘stupid’. When the battleblood’s up it untames you beyond your own control. How can anyone expect to keep an animal in check as well? But he remembered the stories his mother and father used to tell him. The Zainab, riding to battle on the chiming saddles of their riding-guar, scaled armour rippling with motion, lances glinting in the Grazeland sun. Simra fell silent._  
  
 _“Tricksy is what it is,” said Kjeld. “Eastmarchers, they fight like a stone, holding firm, hoping to blunt then break whatever hits it. Kreathings, we’re like hawks — swoop, strike, then gone, back amidst the trees. But the Riftmen…fighting them’s like trying to fight the wind, swirling and circling all round you, bothersome and – storm blast it – impossible to catch. They’ll swirl, sting at you with javelins, knacker your shields, till you’re good and tired and starting to daunt from fighting the wind. Then they gust up, go in with swords, sweep you all before them like leaves.”_  
  
 _Not for the first time, Simra wondered what and who Kjeld had been, before Siska and Vesh — before he was father to a daughter. Who was he to know these things?_  
  
 _“The Rift itself though?” Kjeld said, pushing feeble toward a brighter note. “Pretty enough. Decent weather. They say the roads of the Rift are paved with gold and copper. Not because it’s any richer than anywhere else, you heed, but—…Well, you’ll see soon enough. I only wish we’d brought more spears…practised fighting together. Can’t very well outskirmish a Riftman in the Rift…”_  
  
 _‘Know your enemy,’ Kjeld told me. And before him Ostwulf said the same, among other petty little platitudes and the occasional kernel of real wisdom. So I began to ask about the Rift and its people. I started with Kjeld and haven’t yet finished._  
  
 _Ask Nords from beyond its borders and they’ll say this of the Rift. It’s too much of a melting pot to know what it is. It hems onto too many lands for their liking. Their cultures, ways, wares bleed in. Morrowind’s western highlands and Cyrodiil’s northern Niben. The Jerrals and Velothi mountains. But the hold itself stands up above them both. A plateau of herdcropped grasses and forests the colours of coinage. Or so I’ve heard._  
  
 _Antolios has us preparing. We find a clear flat spot by the road. And he tries to turn us from warriors to soldiers. A unit and not just individuals._  
  
 _“Bulwark!” he calls. The Vahn shuffles close into a circle. Those who fight with shields and those with polearms mix together to form a sturdy sharp-pointed outermost edge. Like a hedgepig balled up and bristling. Behind them, other melee fighters, Terez and her huge sword among them. They close gaps that might form in the circle, butcher whatever comes through. And together they protect a core of archers, crossbows, spear throwers, casters and healers. I’m told that’s where I belong: protected, not a protector._  
  
The campfires smelt of heather. It was nice at first. Like pine but sweet and heady, thistle-flower purple. But like all scents it grew tired with time, and like all smoke it stung the eyes and clawed at the inside of your throat. Mercenaries trudged in from the dark beyond their camp’s three fires, arms full of brush to keep them burning. The flames were hungry and what little the heath had to offer wouldn’t keep them slaked for long.  
  
Simra had always liked firelight. Magelight was cold. It paled and flattened features, chilled and deadened tone. But firelight was all warmth, making beautiful the bones in everyone’s faces, shadowmapped and flickering. Or perhaps it was the ale that did that, and set Simra to guilty remembering — half-seen face and figure, the wet-dry flat of teeth on his neck, felt more clear than the lips that followed…  
  
Simra sat cross-legged round one of the three fires. There was talk more grave than the usual singing and complaints about the sour stale downwatered beer. And Simra sat pretending to listen. But the conversation hushed quiet. His ears pricked up. He’d learnt long ago to heed words spoken in lowered voices.  
  
“…‘Bulwark!’ Mark that, mark that. Perfume-tressed little Nibenese is trying to turn us into a legion!” It was a Nord, three forks to his chest-length beard, a dull ball of pewter in a hatching of scars where his left eye had once been. He sharpened a long low-chinned axe as he spoke. “Well, I won’t be a wall for any coward to hide behind. Let them prove their own worth, I say.”  
  
“Or show there weren’t never none to begin with!”  
  
A low throb of agreement went through the gathered circle.  
  
“Wants us to do his fighting for him, that’s what I think,” said the pewter-eyed Nord. “A leader so long as he leads from the back.”  
  
This time there was no throb or clamour. Only the sound of the other fires, and the talk going on round them.  
  
“How long’ve you been with the Vahn, Steel-Eye?” asked Siska finally. Her voice was hard and flat as a knifeblade. “Two weeks? Three or four at most?”  
  
“Four since I signed on.”  
  
“Then you ain’t seen bare shit!” She snapped, pouncing towards the utter edge of shouting but falling harshly short. “S’the only the reason you’ve got the stones to be sitting there, saying what you’re saying bout Toli. You ain’t seen him fight. Crowshit — if he fought you, he’d break those big stones of yours like wren’s eggs.” She bared her teeth in a cruel black grin.  
  
“I don’t see…” muttered Steel-Eye. “What I don’t see’s how we’re meant to get any killing done, packed like salted fish in a barrel. No room for a man to swing.”  
  
“Then fight out of line,” Simra found himself clipping in. “Leave the circle, fight on your own. See who gets more killing done that way. You or the Riftmen.”  
  
“Mark that!” growled Steel-Eye, rising heavy to his feet and locking his one good eye onto Simra’s two, looking livid down at him. “And mark what I said. The bulwark’s a ring of the brave round a soft core of cowards! Runts like this little shit here!”  
  
Simra was on his feet now, craning his neck to stare up at the big Nord. A waver stirred through him, uncertain in place, unsure in nature. It was a changing thing, defiant or cowed. Simra wanted to look over to Siska and find her by his side. But he held steady.  
  
“Four weeks, right?” said Simra, trying for Siska’s knifeblade calm. “Reckon you’re still too new to remember the last big milkskinned milksop tried to call me that. Say it once, I’ll forgive you on grounds of pig-ignorance or shit luck. Try it twice, when you make your big stand, there’ll be fuck all left for the Riftmen to kill…”  
  
It was a lie. Big and blustering thorny-talking lies. Moridene called him a runt and worse near enough daily. What did he do to her but sling back his own brand of the same mud? Yet before the rage kicked in and the battleblood flared up, Simra had always fallen back on talk that was bigger and stronger than he was. He’d seen it in cats throughout the Quarter. A rangy little thing could out-yowl, out-hiss and un-tom a bigger dumber quieter beast and come away a winner without baring a claw. He’d done it before and come out the same way.  
  
He could see thoughts worrying at each other behind the big Nord’s one eye. Like Simra could see himself reflected in it. A head and a half shorter. An elf all scrawn and pollard-skinny bones, hawk-faced with a sneering scarred mouth. The Nord knit his brows, set his jaw. Simra braced himself.  
  
“He’s right, Steel-Eye.”  
  
They both looked round to see Terez. The firelight cast her grey hair copper-tinged but her face was stark and firm. She was unarmed, but with her arms crossed strong before her chest, her whole posture looked threatening enough.  
  
“There’s a time for warriors and a time for soldiers. A time to be one man fighting, and a time to fight as one.”  
  
“And which’s it gonna be when I beat this runt to meal?” growled Steel-Eye.  
  
“I know which it’ll be when we fight in the Rift for the first time. I’ve not fought Riftmen, but I think I know how they fight. Learnt that and a dozen more hard lessons trying to war against the horse-tribes of the Bjoulsae basin. D’you want to know what the hardest lesson I learnt was?”  
  
Silence. All eyes on Terez as she stood statue-strong and statue-still. She spoke into the waiting hush:  
  
“Dead mercs don’t get paid.”

 


	19. Chapter 19

Again the sky was darkening. Sun’s Dawn, and yet the days ran short, continued dim. Today was crowned with clouds that sped quick as birdflocks, chased by winds that ruled those high parts of the world. But not a lick of a breeze stirred down below. Not a scrap in Simra’s hair, a gust to soothe his skin, sweat-drenched and burning. The coarse-grown heaths and sheerish rises on each side of the valley made sure of that.  
  
Every doling of daylight carried on the same. There was little worth remembering about the time spent travelling now. Instead Simra remembered coming this way, recalling why he hated the countryside. How it dwarfed him: a giantish nothing, slack and swollen, full of its own emptiness. So the time he spent thinking, doing new things rather than sleepwalking, seemed always to be when the day was dusking itself down to nothing but night and cloud-ridden stars.  
  
Yesterday they’d passed through Pargran again as the road went close by the river. It was still meagre and awful. A clutching of mudhuts and dirt-mortared drystone, it would’ve made Simra feel grateful for all the comfort he’d known in the Quarter, if his mind hadn’t been taken up with three strains of feeling. Pity, disgust, boredom, snapping at each other and pecking at him. Pargran was the same as a year ago. Only two things had changed. An outhouse had been burnt to cinders and bones of timber. A squat half-hearted little earthwalled fort had started rising up in the distance, building itself from the riverside.  
  
Antolios had them prepare to fight together every day at dawn. At dusk, Simra found Terez and she tried to prepare him to fight apart from the others. Less how to kill, more how to survive. Though often, she said, the two got muddied till they seemed near enough the same.  
  
They stood off from the main camp but still in sight. Mantle and tunic both gone, Simra was unclothed to his undershirt and sweating despite the evening chill. Terez was dressed fully in her jerkin and tall boots. Skin dry, face calm, she went through her own motions while watching Simra, calling out commands.  
  
What she did was almost like dancing except for the long-bladed long-hilted sword that led each movement. Every step and shift of her body directed the sword somehow. Leaning back and lowering her stance, she fell perfect into a parry. Weighting forward, lunging with one foot and pushing with the other, she transmuted the guard into a neck-high two-handed thrust. Step round, parry again, then the weight of her pommel came about to strike as she followed through, circling and circling, bringing the blade in her wake to cut neat and graceful as her steps edged her into retreat.  
  
“Fire again,” she said, not breaking her stride or rhythm.  
  
Simra groaned. But the way she moved and practiced shamed him to the brink of bettering himself. For the third time in the last hour, Simra groped deep down inside himself, searching for something more to burn. At first it had come easy, and was coming easier every day. But by now the reaching up and calling out had got heavier, or he’d got weaker. Like thinking a path through miles of mud, feeling through the warning strain Terez had put on his muscles. His thighs seared dull from the fighting crouch she insisted he keep up. His right arm was leaden-heavy, nearly too plaintive to hold the sword she insisted he keep a grip on.  
  
He rooted his feet, wove with his left hand’s calloused fingers. Then he drummed with his feet, pushed with his hand, called with his words and reached for whatever power he could yearn up. Sparks huffed harmless as fireflies from his hand. A wave of smoldering weeds and gorse glimmered out from his feet, showered with red-gold and glittering, then black and inert the next moment. That was all.  
  
“I don’t…” Simra panted. “I can’t…” A half-starved pang tied itself up in his belly. It doubled him over, wincing and gasping for breath. Something will always be eaten. “Don’t reckon I’ve got anything left…”  
  
“It’ll come,” Terez said. She strode closer, across the blackened windshort grass. “With practise, it’ll come. Push your limits, those limits fall back, and cease to limit you. Now, what do you do when there’s no magic left?”  
  
Simra looked up, eyes wide and pleading. He knew what came next but hoped against hope it wouldn’t. He wanted to lie down, sleep, drink till what she said stopped making sense.  
  
“Sword,” she said. “The eight cuts, in order.”  
  
The blade had always been heavy, but in motion that gave it speed if not finesse. Now the heaviness was just weight. Cramps crept in like burrowing ants between his knuckles, deadening the feeling down every tendon. A black scowling pain barred his arm from wrist to shoulder. He wrenched in a breath, wiped sweat from his brow and pushed back his ill-kempt hair.  
  
“Like I showed you,” she said. “Continuous. The step of the feet. That’s one. The turn of the hips that puts power to the shoulder. That’s two. Then the arm that directs that power. Three. Like firing an arrow. The bow and the string share the work, and make the barb strike hard.”  
  
Simra raised the blade. Cut. Down neck to hip on the left. Cut. Same again on the right. Swing. Up from belly to shoulder—  
  
Simra hissed. Something knotted, burst into pain, then fell slack and failed to move. His right arm hung by his side as he cradled it in his left. “Shit shit shit, blood of my blood and bones of my ancestors…” he snarled. “I can’t.”  
  
“Back to fire, then.” Terez didn’t stop her dance.  
  
“I can’t,” he said again, pleading this time.  
  
“Then this lesson is over,” she said. Now she paused, resting her sword on one shoulder and looking Simra up and down. He was pale-grey, ragged round the edges, sweat-drenched and shame-faced. “But here’s something to think on. You’ve got your flames at first. They scare off cowards, burn up the brave. But you’ll use them, and eventually they’ll burn down, and if someone’s still trying to hurt you? You have your sword to fall back on. But if you teach your body to give up, not fight on, and there are enemies stronger, more stubborn, more practised than you? Or just fresher to the fight? Where does that leave you?”  
  
Simra couldn’t speak the word. But there it was — a cold lump in the back of his brain that thought refused to touch. And here with Terez, among the Vahn and safe, Simra was scared. Not the shortlived fierce fear that had saved him before. A leering mocking fear, dogging him, like a grim-heavy shadow hitched to his heels. A stubborn clinging thing, grown like weeds round his heart. And it was also a kind of shame.  
  
“Tomorrow then,” Terez said, forcing a smile.  
  
Simra had turned, walking back to the camp, dragging his feet with shoulders slouched.  
  
“You were better today,” she called after him. “You’ll be better still tomorrow.”  
  
But how long till he was good enough? How many days and how much hurt? How much more would save him for certain? He only wanted to be sure. Safe. Unscared.


	20. Chapter 20

 

 

_Much the same, much the same. I feel like something afloat on a river getting washed downstream. The only choices I make each day aren’t really choices at all. Wake and get up, or get left behind. Eat what’s offered or go on hungry. Walk in line or end up lost in the emptiness between here and the Rift’s northern borders._  
  
 _I tell myself it’s different from working for Torbjorn Shattershield. And a snide part of my mind says that, yes, it’s different — with Torbjorn I was paid weekly. At least the ink that stains my fingers belongs to me now. Though I find less and less each day to write about._  
  
 _Sent out with a forage party today. A pair of bandy-legged blonde-haired Nord twins – Herth and Frith – and Siska and me. Frith caught a brace of big hares with her sling, found a nest of eggs. Herth got willowbark and ravelbyne for poultices and tinctures, and a small collection of edible roots. But I followed Siska. She said she smelt cultivated land along the rise. In a cloven nook of these hills, we found orchards and outhouses. We didn’t see a soul as we stole through. But we came back with a sack of oats, a bushel of wizened Winter apples and pears._  
  
 _That’s another truth to mercenary life then. Foraging and theft are often one and the same. It gets worse in enemy territory, Siska told me. Or better, depending on whether you focus on the plenty of the pickings or the backbrain prickle of guilt. The fyrd, she told me, would already have done much worse._  
  
 _Each night I train with Terez. Cuts and parries with one hand and two, between draining myself of magic in hopes that next time I’ll have more to spend. Once I’m good and tired she’s begun to join in, oppose me. We both put down steel and she brings out two wooden rods – like we used for swords when I was proved into the Vahn – then she tests how well I know my guards. Not at all, it seems. I have bruises on top of the plaint of my muscles now. And what every bruise means about me as a fighter worries me._  
  
Simra had read a longish poem once, about the Nibenay Basin. A couple dozen stanzas and no characters, not a single word spoken by a living tongue. Just disembodied praise for its sky-surfaced rivers and their bounties of firm-fleshed fish, the voluptuous plenty of its fields and paddies. Even then, Simra knew it had been a bad poem. But he remembered the way it talked about soil. Rich and black, wholehearted and frank.  
  
Here the earth was dark and pungent. Recalling the poem, at first Simra wondered why there weren’t farmers here fighting for such rich dirt. But the soil itself gave an answer in time. It was nasty with grit, waterlogged but so coarse it refused to become mud. Hardy stubborn weeds and chokes of rush were all that grew here. The bones of the occasional tree broke up from the landscape, roots gnawed bare too low for comfort or good anchorage.  
  
“Flood country,” said Vesh as he saw Simra looking. “It’s the Darkwater River’s doing. In weeks this will all be waist-deep in water. It happens every Spring when the snows melt.”  
  
The river veined out into so many creeks and brooks the land was riven with them. The Vahn couldn’t travel more than a league without having to cross one. Brown wide lazy currents, lowbanked with broad flats of silt — their only mercy was in being shallow. The whole place had a scent of long slow rot that turned Simra’s stomach — a sense of things trapped between decay and preservation.  
  
They passed what might have been a keep once, at the fork of two waterways. Now it was a piling of rainwashed mildewed stones, smirched and darkly slick with the leavings of flood after flood, year after year. The walls were tumbledown, the roofs yawning open. A storm of shrilling birds rose up from inside its sickly belly as Simra watched. Then it was behind them.  
  
Days back the road had disappeared. Days later they found it once more. Only a dirt track, trenched a few feet down on one side. Every few leagues they’d find a low sad cairn of mossgrown rocks, or a grim ill-formed bundling of sticks and ragged twine, like childsized scarecrows. Simra tried not to look at them. They were foreboding fretful little things. Worse still, they seemed watchful.  
  
 _“Ever been so far this way as to end up at Darkwater Crossing?” Kjeld asked me._  
  
 _I told him I hadn’t._  
  
 _“I’d say you’re lucky then, if that weren’t where we’re headed. But we’re running low on supplies, and they’re the only place that people live partway like people are meant to in these parts. And besides, they’re the only good ford hereabouts that’ll get us across the Darkwater and on to where we’re needed. No choice in it…”_  
  
 _The way he began, I’d started to expect a story. But we arrived at the Crossing and left it before the story began. The awful mommets grew thicker round and towards the place. Childshapes of sticks and twine and lumpen muddish glue, hung in the trees and pitched in the ground. And at the edges of the village, we found its people expecting us._  
  
 _A ragged shieldwall of men and women, brandishing boards and doors, the occasional actual shield, and hatchets and sickles and use-knives. A tired-skinned man stepped forward. Antolios stepped from our column to meet him, hand resting easy on the pommel of his sword. The shieldwall rippled behind. Nervous? Or just weary of holding firm?_  
  
 _“You’re the alderman?” Antolios asked._  
  
 _“Not that I’d know it,” said the man. “No. Reckon I’m just Fauld.”_  
  
 _“If you speak for Darkwater Crossing I’ll speak to you and not mind what you call yourself.”_  
  
 _The man only nodded. Like he was wary to trade words with strangers. Like he was thinking the trade might cheat him somehow. But they spoke._  
  
 _Scouting parties came this way days before, he said. Men on horses with padded gambesons. Outriders from the fyrd, we reckoned immediately. But Antolios said we knew nothing of them, were nothing to do with them. Just as well, for Fauld said they’d stolen from them._  
  
 _“We’re soldiers,” admitted Antolios, gesturing back to the column. “But we don’t intend to steal from you. We’ll pay coin for any provisions you can offer, and for use of your ford. Perhaps that’ll help to recoup what you lost before?”_  
  
 _Fauld eyed us, looked back at his own men and women. Maybe he thought to deny us, but he saw our swords, our shields, our spears. His face twisted, then fell slack and defeated. That was the look of a beaten man, knowing we might take what he wouldn’t let us buy. We crossed the river, leaving with potatoes, beetroots, a barrel of tarry ambiguous smoked fish…_  
  
 _Then Kjeld told me about Darkwater Crossing. He’d hinted at a story and now it came._  
  
 _Years ago – more than a dozen and less than a score – a witch lived on the small wooded rise beyond Darkwater Crossing. An elf, the story went, who had given up being either man or woman for their magic. They lived in a rickety hut, woven together from the rickety trees, and the villagers offered them a mixture of fear and respect, for the witch helped them in ways that only a witch can._  
  
 _In times when the common garden of the village fell fallow, the witch would make squash grow above the ground, and potatoes beneath it. In times when the waters were empty of fish, the witch would spawn fat-legged toads from the shallows. When nanny-goats wouldn’t kid, or gave no milk, the witch would ease the birth or fix the dry spell that’d stricken them._  
  
 _Those were the terms of the agreement the witch had made with the village elder. But the witch had asked something else too, and the elder told no-one till it was too late. Being neither man nor woman, the witch could neither bear nor seed children of their own. A child was what the witch asked of the elder, and a long time passed in peace and plenty before the elder’s promise was tested._  
  
 _Her grandson’s wife was with child. One rainy night, the labour pains began. There had never been a birth in Darkwater Crossing as hard on the mother as this one. And so, in desperation, the elder did something she had done for no other mother in the village — she called upon the witch._  
  
 _The witch came through the rain and to the hut. They burnt candles of beeswax and sharp-smelling herbs. They cut their palm and drew blood upon the brow and belly of the mother. They sang, and the wind outside moaned in harmony. The labour came to an end, but there was no babe — only a flow of muddy water._  
  
 _“I have taken what you promised me,” the witch said._  
  
 _The villagers swarmed in anger. The witch had given them a reprieve from hunger, a shelter from misery and toil, but now they had paid the witch’s price. They demanded the witch tell them where the child was. The witch said nothing. They broke the witch’s bones and asked again. Still nothing. They buried the witch alive. The last thing seen of the witch was a flash of their blood-red hair, and a knowing proud smile as the last shovel-load of dirt was piled onto their rope-bound body._  
  
 _In years to come the elder left town and never returned, running perhaps from her guilt. And on rainy nights, the floodlands echoed with the sound of a child laughing, playing, or weeping as if lost. Darkwater Crossing fell to poverty and poor pickings. All that would grow there was a suspicion of strangers, as if the ground itself had been poisoned. But the villagers muddled on, as honest country folk always will. And to this day, they still make dolls of twigs and twine, childshaped and childsized: playmates to guide the witch-taken child home._  
  
 _A stupid story, I reckon. One that says more about backwater Nords – their refusal to accept magic or trust mer, or understand the ways of either – than it does about anything that might once have happened in Darkwater Crossing to make it as forbidding and miserable as it is now._  
  
 _So why did I feel the need to write it down? Ironic that perhaps it’s the Zainab in me. The part that knows and loathes how many stories and secrets are lost to me: spoken once, but dead now the throats that spoke them have fallen silent. Maybe that’s what makes me think that even bad stories deserve to be written down somewhere, to have a chance at being remembered._

 


	21. Chapter 21

The land rose gradual, winding and winding to teach itself new heights. But it was hard to notice. Not like the clamber of the hills that made the more rugged edges of Eastmarch merciless steep. There was no telling burn in the backs of Simra’s calves to say they were going uphill. And the climb itself led through pines that thickened as the air grew thin. The first time they parted enough for Simra to look back the way they’d come, he saw a gaping leap of sky where land should’ve been, then the flats of Eastmarch below.  
  
He remembered what Kjeld had once told him about hinterlands. On the few maps he’d seen, the borders between holds looked neat and clear as only ink can be. But maps are useful lies, nothing more. The world is stranger than they’ll allow. Here in the tree-shade, between tree-trunks broader than three grown men could link hands around, was a place between places and a place of its own. Here there was only a crooked path, the run of hares and unseen things, the startling flight of birds to snag on the forest-thick silence.  
  
The smell of wet coarse dirt, things set rotting and things conserved by rot — they’d left that behind now. It belonged to the floodlands. The scent of this place was dry and deep, sighed from the pelting of soft pine needles that covered the ground in quiet.  
  
Things didn’t decay here so much as they were dismantled. Through the standing trees Simra saw another larger trunk, lain on its side. It was chewed and bitten, shaped irregular. Its bark seemed to crawl. Lice, ants, spiders and mites – the burrow and share of mice and badgers and whatever else had a part yet to play – Simra wondered how many years they’d been at work on that fallen tree, and how many years it had lived and grown before its fall. He felt like crying but couldn’t.  
  
The straps of his bags had long dug trenches in his shoulders. Dawns back he’d given up hours of sleep one morning to wash his clothes in the cleanest creek he could find. Now they felt stiff and rough. Beneath them he was wooden. Recent nights he slept enough to pay back that debt. Still he carried on tired.  
  
There was less talk in the column as they travelled. Less talk still in Simra’s chest. He walked at the edge of the line, spoke in nods and short blunt murmurs when speaking couldn’t be shirked on. Anything clearer, longer, made the weariness worse. Like drawing from a well inside him that had gone dry long ago, yet people still probed the dust and disturbed it, hoping for water.  
  
Part of him wanted to be alone. That part grew slow. It chewed and reworked its way through him, claiming territory. He knew it was stupid – that he’d be missed for a moment, then left behind – but knowing better doesn’t stop want and never has. And he wanted that: to be missed.  
  
They carried on.  
  
One day the forest roof gaped open before them. It showed blinding blue, snares of dove-grey cloud. Between the clouds there was something solid.  
  
“The Throat of the World,” someone murmured matter-of-fact and reverent both at once. “Or part of it.”  
  
“Why are we so far west?” Vesh asked. The frown in his voice was audible.  
  
“We’re as far west as we need to be,” said Antolios firmly from the front of the column. “There’s more than one way from Eastmarch into the Rift. And we’re a small party. Easy prey for outriders, if we were stupid enough to take one of the main routes. Now do you see why we’re taking the longer lesser travelled path?”  
  
“Toli’s right,” said Kjeld, louder so his words would carry, overheard down the column. “I for one’d sooner have trees and uneven ground between me and Riftfolk scouts than an open road and a downhill charge for them, an uphill fight for us.”  
  
“I’d bet gold that’s the way Ulfric’s ordered the fyrd,” someone muttered. “Any chance to show his stones…”  
  
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Antolios said. “But an army of hundreds going the main route into the Rift – out in the open – that wouldn’t just show balls. It’d show confidence. It also makes it seem like he’s already shown all the cards in his hand. Nothing up his sleeve. What better way to hide cunning than by building a reputation for brute courage? Don’t tell me that’s not the Ulfric you’ve heard of.”  
  
Somewhere, further off than the trees would let him see, Simra heard the crash and pour of a waterfall.  
  
The trees thinned that day. The ground levelled off till it seemed unkiltered. Simra’s balance teetered strange for a time. He’d gotten too used to the secret upward incline of the last few days. But with the sparsing of the woods, that feeling faded too.  
  
The days were broader. The dry shadowed cool of the sloping hinterlands gave way. The knot of weak and weariness in Simra’s chest loosened a little. His heart had room to beat. And there was birdsong between the trees. Green creepers and bright white berries hung among the branches. The scent of pine was pleasant now, not resinous and pressing heavy.  
  
Terez trained Simra for the first time in days. As the night was darkening, tuneful with soft winds and the sound of wood longing towards wood with the breeze, she told him he was getting better. That they’d make a fighter of him yet. And for a moment he was happy instead of scared by the familiar signs that’d gone to seed in him lately, and what they meant was coming. Maybe this time he could hold it off. Or maybe this time the worst was over and easier than usual. He dared to hope.  
  
Next day the trees changed. Their bodies before had been broad and knotty, warted with boles and thigh-thick branches, oozing half-set sap. They’d become thinner, with pewter for bark and silver limbs. Buds like greening copper had begun to spray out from their arms and fingertips. The ground was faded red and amber still with last year’s fallen leaves. Like Kjeld had promised, the world had turned the colour of coinage. Simra’s jaw began to ache and the skin of his face grew stiff. He realised he’d been smiling a small smile all through the morning.  
  
But the scent of things changed again too. Over the cool flat pine-smell was something sweet and ruddy on the wind. It was a florid throat-catching kind of wrong that Simra tried desperate to ignore.  
  
The column stopped. Shoulders and elbows, Simra pushed towards the front. The smell had become a reek. He nearly knew already, but the knowing recoiled from itself. Some grim filthy corner of him wanted to be sure.  
  
“The trees,” someone said through the silence. It was Shora, pointing up. Kjeld stood behind her, gripping her shoulders but not covering her eyes like he’d used to.  
  
The year was still too early for flies, but here they’d found purchase despite the cool. Through their buzzing, the caw and wings of hook-beaked hungry birds, shapes hung in the trees. Four corpses, dangling and swollen like fruit. The ground beneath their shoe-stripped feet was dark with their leavings. Over their heads they all wore a scarf or scrap of Stormcloak blue, noosed tight like hangman’s sacks, their faces hidden.  
  
“Bulwark!”  
  
A clamour and struggle, all sharp bones and herdish focused motions. The Vahn ringed round Ra’baali’s cart, unhitching shields, bracing spears. Simra crammed against one wheel, staring wild out between the shoulders of bigger people, stronger people. Protected, not a protector. Steel hissed beside the rasping sighs of folk barely daring to breathe.  
  
“Steady… Steady! Watch that treeline!”  
  
For the first time Antolios was in formation, fit into its outside. On one arm the tall diamond of his shield, and in the other hand his sword. The rest shifted uneasy. Not one unit – not like they’d trained for – but one cornered animal, not knowing whether to fight or flee. Not knowing, not knowing. The uncertainty rose tidal through them, filling the waiting watchful silence.  
  
“Come on!” Someone was shouting. “Come on then!”  
  
The silence split. The whole Vahn was yelling, screaming insults, growling threats.  
  
“Come and test your steel!”  
  
“Come on, come out, my sword’s getting thirsty.”  
  
A scattered wave of tight-voiced snarling song, mean and tense with fear and anger, ebbing and waxing with how many singers knew the words:  
  
“I’ve whittled down twelve men like you,  
And today’s a baker’s dozen.  
I’ve killed two dozen men like you,  
I swear I’d kill a thousand!”  
  
Swords and axes cracked dull against shields, beating rhythm to the roiling voices.  
  
Simra didn’t know what he said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do. He lost himself, clawing for courage in the midst of it all.  
  
But there was no drumroll of hooves, no javelins from the trees. Only the wooden creak and rope-hemp whine of the bodies hung up in the trees. The sway, their sway, and their swaying. Then nervous laughter that turned to another deathly silence.  
  
“Hold,” said Antolios. “Keep on. Got to be sure.”  
  
And still nothing came.  
  
Steel-Eye slipped from the ranks, big axe held aloft. He turned and turned, grinning through his beard, looking round with hands above his head. “See?” he said. “Another drill. A blasted singalong! What for? There’s no-one here but us and four dead men! Welcome to the Rift, sweetmeats!”  
  
More nervous laughter. Moment by moment, the circle dissolved. “You did well,” Antolios was trying to shout. “We did well!” But there was no telling who heard above the growing sound of chatter, muttering, murmuring.  
  
Simra was left rooted by the wagon wheel. He couldn’t stop looking at the corpses. Their covered faces stared back. The rents in their gambesons were stained near-black with what had poured from the wounds beneath. He felt seasick, dry-mouthed, dry-lipped. His palm was sweaty round the grip of his sword. He didn’t even remember drawing it.  
  
He looked and looked, head full of the fallen tree in the woods before — broken off and being broken down, bitten to nothing by the world’s thousand thousand teeth. Scared off by the shouting, steel-noise, singing, the crows were returning to perch on and around the bodies.  
  
“Cut them down,” said Simra. It came out louder than he’d intended. “Cut them down,” he repeated louder still. “Do something about them for pity’s sake. Do something!”  
  
A panicked note sobbed into his voice. He was on the edge, feeling something before the nothing swept in. An animal cram of fear and pity, angry disgust. He was afraid. Like the fear Terez put into him near every time they trained. He’d seen death before. He’d seen corpses before. But this was a death he could share in. It could be him, it could be him.  
  
Simra pelted off the track behind a broad swathe of undergrowth. He lost his breakfast to the forest floor. His back heaved, his eyes dry and reddish-painful with the full feeling of tears that refused to come when he called.  
  
On the path they moved the wagon beneath the bodies to reach and cut them down. They called Simra’s name. Shame kept him silent. Soon the stench was replaced by a deep throaty rancid smoke. In an hour or so, the Vahn’s column moved on, left the pyre they’d lit behind.  
  
Simra trudged in train, tired, empty of thought, food, hope. Just ashes remained.


	22. Chapter 22

“Do you know how we got our name? Vahn. The Red Vahn? It’s not just a rune, nor shorthand for a copper bit. The wordplay goes deeper, hey? Older. It’s from Skyrim’s elder tongues. The language of our oldest and longest poems. From before the Empire started to unite the world. Not with their legions. No. With language. Culture. ‘Vahn’ is a rune for hunter-birds. Hawks, falcons, eagles. Fast and vicious things. And from there it came to a warrior’s parlance as ‘vahngard’. Those that go before a fyrd – in front of the banners in battle – clearing a path, probing weaknesses, or making them. The spearhead of their lord’s might…”  
  
She was older than him, who knew by how many Winters. But her stride was brisker, longer, sounding out dull with the flatnails soled onto her boots. The stump and stump of her spearbutt joined the rhythm every few steps. An oldish woman, a Nord, she still had a vigour to her — a shortsword slung from her belt, a shield strapped over one shoulder. All this, though her hair had long turned white and fell in plaits and snarls down her back. Only the way she spoke marked out her age: the patient ramble of the old speaking to the young.  
  
Othertimes Simra would’ve hated it. She gave no gaps for him to slant in a single word. But now he had none to give. Listening, nodding, was hard enough. He strained just to hear over the blank noise that filled his head. Too many thoughts, clamorous and senseless, or else no thoughts at all but animal impulse. He fought to put one foot in front of the other, walking as she talked on.  
  
“So do you see, child?” She’d lowered her voice, talking conspiratorial. “Why some who know scraps of the old tongue, and have been warriors longer than most, might not be best pleased? Skulking like this? Following the fyrd, not making way for it. We belie our name. And names like that – the few rare remembered pieces of something all but forgotten – are precious. Sacred. Not to be meddled with, hey?”  
  
Simra looked ahead. Past the step-swaying shoulders of the other mercenaries, their packs and arms. Past the yokebacked spines of Ra’baali’s carthorses. On until he saw Antolios. Even from behind, his foreign shield singled him out: a tallish diamond, red-painted, steelshod round its edges. Unlike most of the others, he walked alone at the head of the column. Simra pitied him that, but envied him too.  
  
The Nord woman was looking at him expectant. She’d told him her name, or assumed he knew it already. He’d forgotten or never been told. Her eyes were piercing blue. He met them for a moment, and it was a moment too long.  
  
“Right,” Simra hurried, nodding small, head bowed to look off from her gaze. “I see.”  
  
He forced thanks, farewells, excuses into those three words, knowing he couldn’t say more. Head down, Simra paced quickly forward through the shoulders, shields, spears and bundled baggage, onward into the column’s fore until he found a hole in the pack of people. It wasn’t safe, wasn’t quiet, but perhaps it was somewhere no-one would speak to him.  
  
Three words, days of walking, Simra was exhausted. But no matter how tired he got, Simra still slept poorly. He lay awake with eyes gummed shut for trying. He slipped in and out of sleepless dreams, where the dark behind his eyelids formed shapes, spat out ideas. He ate but was never hungry. Everything tasted of nothing.  
  
It was familiar but not something he could get used to. The grey descending again, with the same inevitable caprice as weather — today it’s dry, the sun shines, but somewhen round the corner there’ll be rain, always. It wrapped him like mist. Like things seen through fog, it twisted what was. Worry turned to dread. Fear turned to panic. Sadness, sorrow lost their edge but weren’t felt any less keenly. They just stopped being things themselves, and carved out hollows in him, heavy with cold nothing.  
  
Sometimes he thought of home. He missed things. He imagined if he had them back, things might be better. If he could scent his mother’s porridge with a generous stir-in of sweet pungent hotpickle, he might work up a hunger. If he could sink his teeth into the oil-rich layers of her panbreads, rolled up into spirals round fills of smashed parsnip or yam, fried eggs, maybe he’d taste again, want to eat again. If he had his hammock, perhaps he could sleep. And then he hated himself for thinking that way, stepping back on his choices, too weak to bear them.  
  
He didn’t write. He felt like he was starving his journal, watching it go to waste. But he had nothing to feed it.  
  
Guilt hung over him as he walked. No real cause. Only a feeling that every breath and every step was a sin against himself.  
  
Night fell. The Vahn pitched camp in the treeless gaps of a small coppice. They’d left the pines behind when the ground flattened out. The Rift was all round them now. Its trees had bark like paper, were slim, silverskinned, with branches beginning to bud. There was no wind, no stars in the sky, nor any clouds.  
  
Ra’baali had Simra fetch something, carry another, tend to a pot on a fire. He was glad of something to do. Then he was too tired to do them. Then he was glad again, till his tongue seemed to swell in his throat and he couldn’t think for feeling so keenly that this was him now, finding himself, returning to normal as he worked off the grey. He was wrong. Surrounded by people, even in shadows, he wouldn’t let himself sob as the grey rushed in, never really gone.  
  
He’d laid out his bedroll. The ground was dry. He sat on the hide, furlining turned inward. With legs crossed he tilted back his head, rolled his shoulders, felt the aches and kinks in his shoulders that came from carrying packs, putting up with satchel-straps and gathersacks.  
  
“Seen you like this before.”  
  
He knew it was Siska without opening his eyes. But he opened them, unstretched his neck and closed off the bare of his throat. He huddled into his patchwork scarf as the nightcold came down, pulling into it till it covered his mouth, was warm against his nose.  
  
“What’s got you in its teeth, Sim?”  
  
Siska talked slow, careful, as if to an animal likely to scare. She crouched above the coppice-floor, sat on her haunches with knees wide, head cocked birdish to look at him. There was a sway to her, a metal cup in her hand.  
  
“‘Course, don’t reckon you’ll actually answer me. I know you. At least, reckon I know you a bit. You talk a lot or not at all.” She spat off to the side. “Now’s a not-at-all time, I’d bet? Fine. Just…wanted to…”  
  
She tailed off, took a deep quick drink from her cup. Then she offered it over to Simra, holding it out insistent.  
  
Simra eyed it. It was a gift. Someone caring to give him something, enough to be forceful about it — perhaps it touched him, or else he was too weak to refuse. He took the cup, drank deep like she had. He choked, gasped and sputtered, throat burning for a moment.  
  
“Shit, right?” Siska said gently. “The utterest.”  
  
“Fuck is it?” Simra managed, voice hoarse.  
  
“Not sure. Clovis stills it somehow. Probably best we don’t know from what. Here…”  
  
She brought out a little palm-sized clay flask, took the cup from Simra, and the flask replaced it. She sat down an armlength from him, drank in silence. Simra did the same till his head felt bright and clear, then fugged, mussed and warmish. After the first few sips he didn’t notice the taste.  
  
“S’alright,” said Siska, and again, minutes later. “S’alright, Sim…”  
  
He closed his eyes, crossed his legs, hung down his head till he stifled himself hot-breathing into the folds of his scarf. His body slackened. Thoughts burning low, growing quiet, losing push and brunt. He was sitting, then he was on his side, legs curled up. He was struggling off his boots, burrowing into his bedroll.  
  
“S’alright,” said Siska. “I’ll come back tomorrow night. Do this again if you need. Again after that,  if that’s what it takes. Again and again till you wake up one morning and the shittiest thing you’ve got to deal with’s a hanger to end all hangers. And you realise, shit, whatever it was, it didn’t kill you. And you’re still alright. Alright again…”  
  
He slept.  
  
Dreams. A field with the grass grown long, colourless as dust. The sky flat as stone and solid, like even the outdoors is inside something stiff-edged and larger. The world is ceiling, floor, dry and mote-strewn air. One tree snarls up from the hard-packed earth. Its branches are scaled with stiff leaves, drooped with ropes, ragged as long-braided hair. Bodies hanging, dripping black from their bare feet, curled and twisted toes. The ground beneath is tarred with it. Crows cackle unseen. The ropes fray through. The bodies drop soundless one by one. And now he’s over one, stood over one, knelt over one. Hands over the blue hood. Can’t pull it back, off, uncover. He knows what lies beneath but doesn’t want to see. His own face is under the hood and he can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t scream.  
  
He woke. And through another day, Simra walked again. His head ached, his guts writhed uneasy, till Siska came again in the night and sat with him in drinking quiet, then drunken quiet. At least he slept, though the dreams returned and he woke sweating.  
  
The trees grew thin. Without them the world was flat, starkly open and watchful, all golden-brown dryish grasses. Under that, the soil was reddish as rust. There was no path, no road to follow. With so much empty space round them, Simra wondered how they could tell which way was the right one. But he followed, not knowing what else he could do.  
  
Laying camp in the open gave out new fears. How many leagues could any watcher see their smoke, the lights of their fires? Where did they have to hide now?  
  
Terez came, said this was good ground for practice, left that statement hanging as a question. “Not tonight,” was all Simra could say. He couldn’t bear to look at her and see she was disappointed. Or worse, look at her and see what all this meant. A word dogged him through all her training. Every bruise she gave him was a death he might’ve suffered. Not quick enough, not strong enough, not clever enough — but not determined enough to narrow those lacks and make them suffice.  
  
Simra didn’t want to sleep. The open sky scared him too much, even strung through with stars like it was tonight. He went to Ra’baali, asked to be put on watch, and sat in mantle, scarf, boots, sword by his side, watching the silverpierced sky as it stretched off and down to the edge of his seeing, nothing to stop it from forming its own horizon.  
  
Footsteps came through the shadows. Simra turned, groping for his sword, rearing above a surging panic. He strained, drained himself to call up a vague glimmer of magelight. The reddish glow was enough to see by. It was Moridene.  
  
Simra turned back out towards the dark, trying to ease his posture. The hand that reached for his sword was shaking. He closed the fingers of his other hand tight round it, fidgeting with the six-edged ring there.  
  
She threw something down onto the dry grass next to him. It landed with a lightish graceless noise, raising dust that looked like sparks by his light. Moridene stood broad-stanced a small distance off, looking down. He looked up at her, squinting a wordless question.  
  
She nodded pointedly, down at the thing on the ground. Lit as she was, her face looked stiff and smooth like glazed clay, between thick deep shadows, tangled hair. Simra looked away to follow her gaze as the silence between them stretched. The thing was a flopped and deflated thing, but with volume to it. Like the flesh of a torso with the bones and organs taken out.  
  
“It’s for you,” she said, poking the heap with the toe of one boot.  
  
Simra looked up again, blank, blinking. Stupid and feeling stupider each moment, he tried to make sense of her words, her face. “It’s a gift..?” he finally said.  
  
“Shit,” Moridene huffed. “Don’t make it more’n it is. Being as you’re always so full of thanks you’re like to overwhelm me!”  
  
“Thank you,” said Simra, flat and soft.  
  
Moridene paused, looked off to one side, like it was her turn now to misunderstand, struggle for sense. “If it ain’t a hot day in Coldharbour…” she muttered to herself.  
  
“For other things too,” Simra said. “Thanks…”  
  
Another silence came. It left Simra worrying what he’d already spoilt, before he knew what it was he might’ve gained.  
  
“It’s just a jacket,” said Moridene eventually. “Found it. Reckoned you’re the only one skinny enough might fit it…Shit, why don’t you at least take a look?”  
  
Simra picked it up from off the ground. His hands were clumsy no matter how careful he tried to make them. Like they were too cold to feel their way. He shuffled up from sitting to kneel, holding the gift out in front of him. It was a threadbare aketon of layered cloth, dyed a foxbrush red-brown. Its arms were short, ending before the wrist, but quilted thicker than the rest. The bodice of it was cut collarless, double-breasted, struck across the chest horizontal by four tabs of darker stitched fabric, each ending in a triangular button of carved horn to fasten the jacket on the left. A short skirt hung down to the wearer’s mid-thigh. A dark stain and broadish tear pierced the cloth of its belly.  
  
“Where you found it,” Simra began slowly, holding up the aketon and looking it over. “It was at the tree, wasn’t it?…Before we burnt them.”  
  
“…Right. At the hanging tree. Ra’baali had me look ‘em over. Told you I get all the best jobs, now didn’t I?” Her grin was desperate, half-forced. “The one I took that off? I don’t reckon he’d seen more’n sixteen Winters in all his—…What I mean to say’s that that accounts for the fit…”  
  
Simra couldn’t stop looking at it. Like the corpses had trapped his gaze before, the aketon trapped it now. In the fabric under his fingers, in the look of it held in his hands, he was searching for something and found it almost absent. No dread. Just a small sad feeling, clinging to the torn edges of the rent at its belly where a blade must have been driven in. The fabric was strong otherwise. Sturdy.  
  
“It’s good,” Simra nodded. “Glad you got it. Gave it to me. Thank you.”  
  
“I—…It’s nothing. Don’t trouble yourself on it.”  
  
The next morning Simra begged for a needle and thread. Clovis was willing to lend him some. In the evening, he pricked his fingers and gritted his teeth, sewing the dark-stained hole shut in a tight knot of stitching.


	23. Chapter 23

 

 

_Spring, by my reckoning. The mornings din full of birdsong again. The trees glove their bare hands with leaves. And though the nights are cold, the days are a little less so. By midday – between undershirt, tunic, aketon, mantle – heat murmurs up close to my skin, and I wear it till after sunset._   
  
_Thin sheets of rain draw across the open Rift. The layers of weather seen through each other remind me of the veil mazes hung up in Delver’s Nook on a summoning day. Veils upon veils. And through them, and stirred by wind, the Rift’s wide sprad of grasses starts to look like a sea._   
  
_The wet will bring flowers and grain eventually, though it looks miserable now. I know only enough about the growing of plants, the running of farms, to know that much. And like weather rages one day but is bound another to clear, I’m still bad, but getting better._   
  
_Siska told me that one morning I’d wake up and realise I’d survived whatever I’m suffering from. She doesn’t know the half of it, but still tries to help. I know in the small wise part of me left starved but still alive even through all of this — I know that what I’ve got to survive is myself._

 

...  
  


Simra’s neck itched. His shoulders prickled. He fidgeted, rolling muscle on bone in each uneasy joint or socket. For the first fourteen years of his life, tradition kept his scalp sheared to stubble. But for something that happened so often, Simra had never liked having his hair cut.  
  
“How much do you want me to take?” asked Clovis. His long precise fingers wandered over the pouches of the apron-belt he wore, checking his tools. Fabric scissors, softbrush, oil, razors. Simra eyed them nervous from the corner of his gaze.  
  
“I don’t care,” he muttered, lying through his teeth. “Just not too short. Leave enough to – uh – to play with. But not so much it gets in the way. And nothing too—…Nothing that’ll make me look like—…I don’t wanna look like a Nord, right?”  
  
“So you’ll settle for anything,” said Clovis. “As long as it’s exactly and specifically what you want.”  
  
Simra flushed in silence. Words were still difficult. He could make them come but not behave. It was embarrassing, watching them tumble from him, fall flat and forget themselves, circling stupid as flies by the butcher’s back door. But that was better than what came before.  
  
“It’s a simpler request than I’m used to,” Clovis assured him softly. “I’ve never known men pickier over their tonsure than some of the fighters in this company. You? No beard to fuss over, no threats of dire and bloody repercussions if I maim your bristly pride. No ‘oh and while your tools are out, here’s a tooth been bothering me these past few months, do you think you could..?’ You, though. Compared with the usual, you’re practically a walk in the sun, Simra.”  
  
“I…actually…now that you mention it, I’ve got this tooth…” Simra leaned into the joke slow and cautious. It fell flat before he could finish it. He was still sluggish, tired, but he’d tried.  
  
Clovis gave a snort, more sympathetic than amused. Not pitying though. “Here,” he said.  
  
And then his hands were in Simra’s hair, fingercombing, pulling, evening what was odd. Simra tensed. A growl began in the back of his throat. His skin crawled familiar at the touch of it. He remembered telling his mother, every two weeks when she cut his hair: it hurts. How every time she set to cutting it, he could have sworn what he told her was true.  
  
The scissors snipped once, twice, three times. Then Clovis harped his fingers through the lot of it once more, plying all he could back and up. He fiddled, tangled for a moment, then let go. “Done,” he said. “At least until you really know what you want.”  
  
Simra had been holding his breath, letting it go only in a long tooth-clenched hiss. Now it left in a sigh. He reached up tentative to feel the damage. Only the awkward overgrowth at the back of his head had been touched. Everything from his temples upward was pulled back into a cloth tie: a tuftish little tail at the back of his crown. The rest was wisps and fringes, tickling down to mid-jaw, or tucked behind his ears.  
  
“You hardly cut anything,” Simra said. Relief sang small in his voice.  
  
“I’m a healer, not a barber,” said Clovis. “I just happen to have the tools to cut hair on occasion.”  
  
“Oh,” said Simra, still feeling at his hair, wishing for a mirror or a spell to see himself in. “The cloth bit,” he began, shy, after a few moments. “What colour is it?”  
  
“It’s just linen, Simra, same as I’d use for dressings and poultices. If you want something prettier, find a nice shirt to tear for ribbons.”  
  
Simra looked Clovis over. The long low drape of his skirts, the belted apron, and the bell-sleeved crimson shirt he wore, high-necked, buttoned with small star-knots of dark cord. He eyed the shirt pointedly.  
  
“Someone else’s…” Clovis warned. His eyes scowled while a small knife-thin smile slit open his face.  
  
Simra rose from the treestump he’d sat on. Long absent, a grin ached on his face again. He cast his eyes low, defensive. Ducking away from Clovis, he brushed trim-stray hair from his neck and shoulders, ruffled the back of his head. His fingers faltered idle against the dock-tailed tuft Clovis had tied it back into. It felt good — clean, neat, clever.  
  
“It’s nice,” he said, not looking at Clovis but meaning the words for him. “I like it. Thank you.”  
  
Beyond the stump, Clovis, his small cart, the Vahn was making camp. The sun set later in recent days, though still earlier than felt right for sleeping. It dipped in a wash of blood beyond the world’s wide stark West — dazzles of orange, blisters of burn-scar pink. Simra watched it sink, moving visible, as he shrugged into his aketon again, knowing the night would come down a cold reminder of the Winter that was partway to fading. He left the jack open, right breast buttoned onto itself to fold away from his chest. And he walked back to the camp.  
  
There were dry sores of worn skin, hidden in his shoes. It was less the walking and more the long wearing of boots that had left them. The shoes had been his long enough now that maybe his feet should know better, but flesh learns slow, and plaints all the while. His shoulders ached from hauling baggage. But there was a fire in him that’d been unlit, tamped down by the grey. But now he wanted to do and be doing. Making up for the time he’d lost to himself. No energy to do either, but that didn’t stop the need.  
  
The drinking, singing, speeches had tailed off some way through the journey. The Vahn ate and rested somber and heavy after a day’s march, and every day before. There was talk over maps people held in their heads. There were gripes at the Riftmen, still unseen, for not showing themselves. But mostly people ate, then sat as something to do before sleeping.  
  
Simra walked till he found Terez, seated by a fireside, gnawing at half a nameless roast game bird. He crouched next to her on his haunches, not looking, but letting her know he was there. The wolfish cast of her face had gotten harder, hungrier recently. Like something in her was eating half what she tried to eat for herself — a worm, a fear, an omen. He never saw her without her sword now, even clumsy as it was to carry.  
  
“You’re skulking,” she finally said, wiping her mouth. “You want to ask something, ask it.”  
  
She was thorny, warding off like she hadn’t before. A leaden round in Simra’s belly said in a sinking voice that she had cause to be. He’d been worse. He’d been useless, refusing a gift she gave freely, night after night after night.  
  
“Tonight?” he asked. “I’m sorry. I was hoping..?”  
  
“So was I,” she cut in, cut him off. “And every time, you made sure I knew how much of a fool I was for hoping. So here’s my answer, Simra. Not tonight.”  
  
“Not..? Shit. Break me on the fucking wheel,” Simra muttered. His grin had turned to nothing, quick as a snuffed candle, then to a questioning scowl. He tried, was willing to try harder. She’d told him he was getting better once. He wanted that back, was ready to work and grope and strive towards it. “I said I was sorry. You know I’m sorry. I wasn’t—…I—…”   
  
“Sorry can’t—…Sorry doesn’t—…You want the world to turn for you, at your speed. You want progress, skill, but you don’t want to work for either. You’re a boy, Simra. Just a boy. And it shows.”  
  
“A boy..?” Simra said, then snarled once the hurt set in. “Better a boy than a rangy hag with more swords than friends!” The fire in him flared viscous. Like an injured animal in a panic of pain, biting the hand that dared to help it. Something flat and lax so long snapped behind his eyes.  
  
“You can’t choose when and when not to fight,” Terez spoke cold and calm. “You can’t just train when it suits you. Fighting won’t hold off till it does. Death sure as anything won’t wait till you’re good and ready, Simra.”  
  
“You’re right,” Simra sneered. “Like always. Does it ever get fucking exhausting, hm? Being right for all the long long years you’ve been about and being fucking right?”  
  
Simra was standing now, fists clenched painful-hard. People were staring. Firelight made their faces sharp and brutal.  
  
“Shut up, Simra,” Terez warned.  
  
“Right, ‘cos I was wrong all along wasn’t I? Dead fucking wrong! Stupid of me. How’d I expect an old hound to teach me new tricks?”  
  
“Shut up and walk away.”  
  
“‘Cos that’s all you’ve got to teach, isn’t it? That death doesn’t wait! Reckon you know that all too well, seeing as how it’s breathing down your neck every minute of every day now. Least I’ve still got time to learn!”  
  
“Now.”  
  
“No knowing how long you’ve got left to teach in!”  
  
Her face clouded over, dark as dried blood. She surged, moving fast beyond the speed of Simra’s eyes. Then he was bowled over by pain. It blossomed, glared outward. A line from throat to mid-chest, the tender keel of his ribcage. Like ink splaying off through bad paper. He was looking into a darkness, then staring with bulging choke-wide eyes at the stars above. He writhed, crawled, fetched himself onto his knees, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come.  
  
Simra crawled, wheezing, fighting not to retch. Loathsome, buggish, he scrambled from the firelight, out into the night.  
  
“That’s right,” a voice followed him. “One last lesson for you. How to run! Should think it’ll serve you well!”  
  
His fingers groped at his waist, snagging, thoughtless on ties and fastenings there. He unhooked the knots that held the sheathed sword to his sash. With a weak lash of his arm, he threw it back behind him, to land dumb in the fireside dirt. And he fled it, staggering off, eyes stinging and hot.  
  
He’d tried. He tried. He tried.

 


	24. Chapter 24

_Is the quiet me and my deeds? Or the loom of getting closer to the reality of this war? It’s hard to tell whether no-one’s talking to me, or no-one’s talking at all._   
  
_Terez had few friends in the Vahn but plenty respect her. When she poked a hole in their technique with sword or shield, most would listen. When she said be silent, silence fell hammering-hard. But by the fireside she tried to turn coin-cutter on my pride: shaving off slivers to enrich her own. When I spoke back I was defending myself. She told me be silent, and I wouldn’t._   
  
_I won’t lie down, roll over. I refused to do as others did, and others saw. We were watched. I wonder if some of the looks I get now from the other mercenaries are kennings, agreements, small nods of respect. For talking back to Steel-Eye, then to Terez. For standing my ground. I only regret throwing away the sword, and not knowing how to get it back or who to ask. Not without losing face._   
  
_But the need for a weapon gets more pressing. Like I can feel the fury we’re nearing now, in every step and each league of horizon. I look at a flocking of birds, black against the blue sky, and reckon they’re crows, winging towards some feast not so far distant from where the Vahn walks. I see a churned up grassless spate of ground, and it’s like I can see the skirmish that made it._   
  
_The Rift is not all near-barren grasslands though. We passed farms and snatches of cultivated land. I found they’re different here as well._   
  
_In the wilds of Eastmarch, in the valleys between the hills that fringe the central saltflats, you’ll see a crabbed little snare of turned tamed earth every few leagues. A family of sheep or goats or pigs, and a family of Nords living off them and their garden, perhaps some chickens for eggs. They’re smallholders, and even in the villages where they group together, these are freemen working for themselves, with perhaps a thrall or two working under duress for the year, from one raiding season until the next._   
  
_Most Riftfolk that don’t live in the towns and cities are herders, migrating sheep and goats from pasture to pasture throughout the year. Half-settled but striking their stick and turf shelters regretless when the time comes to move on. The farms we see are fewer than in Eastmarch, but big sprawls of worked land. I remember being dazed partway to disbelief when Kjeld told me each of these expanses were owned by one man or woman and their family. People who had been made by money, but didn’t work their farms so much as let other families live amongst the fields, paying rent to work the land and keep surplus. People like Torbjorn Shattershield — not nobles, but the new-rich, with no serfs working for them but tenants._   
  
_And that’s one of the things that makes the Rift riven. The herders of sheep and goats are the lower rungs of the Rift’s old ways, and the warlords with their herds of horses and oathsworn riders are the upper. The new ways of the Rift are the money-made – landlords in the country, merchants in the cities – and their tenants and clients and wage-workers below them. Not like in Skyrim at all, but more akin to Cyrodiil._   
  
_I want to keep busy. I want to prove my price, the ways I’m worthy. I volunteer myself till Ra’baali runs out of work for me. Every forage party that’s gone out, I’ve gone with them. And here in the Rift, amongst the farms kept for growing coin rather than sustenance, there’s no guilt to hard foraging._   
  
_I dash in amongst the rows of cold-garden greens, young and tender but grown enough to eat now Spring’s here. I snare off sprays of chard, heads of kale and collards, pod after pod of snowpeas. I’ve learnt where to look for the last of Winter’s parsnips too, and leeks grown thick with being left to themselves so long._   
  
_I missed vegetables over Winter. Green things, sweet things, colours — not just potatoes and bread. I help Chioma simmer up soups of roots, sweet with leeks and a wine-coloured spice called sumac that he gets from the clustered berries that grow on many of the Rift’s trees year-round. We rub haunches of goat with it, and its sourish taste mellows their gaminess, and reminds me of the dried lemons we could sometimes afford to buy and crush to seasoning back in the Quarter. But the sumac is richer somehow, more aromatic and pungent. Moridene smells of it constantly, as she spends most idle moments she finds working the leaves from the sumac trees into the bowl of her skinny smoking-pipe, wreathing herself in the blush-grey smoke. Some of the other mercenaries have taken after her and begun to do the same._   
  
_This is a bounty I never knew in the cities. There’s no remorse in it, nor the wince of spending coin that’s far from spare. Instead the seed that Soraya planted in me is pleased at knowing she’d be pleased too, rendering a little fat off the easy-living of others too rich to really miss it. I don’t reckon I’ve needed anyone’s approval since her. I’m fine in and of myself. And when I practice, train – spending my strength to extend it – I do it for me. On my own terms, for my own reasons._   
  
_I make flames dance across my knuckles and spark from my fingertips. I call palmfuls of soft fire into my cupped hands till the feeling’s not desperate, dangerous and hungry, but natural and tame. Something welcome as the idle friendliness of stray cats bumping skulls against my knees and nuzzling against my palms and shins, and not nearly so unpredictable. The magic comes easier every day. And some nights, when I tell myself I’ll find my limits, push them till they’re limits no longer, I call up fires that are hotter, reach farther from me. That burn with more force and bite with sharper teeth. In smoldering grasses, the bright bruise-coloured after-glow that lingers on my eyelids when I shut them in the night-dark, I can see my progress._   
  
_It’s not for approval. None of it. More to prove wrong any who’d tell I’m weak or worthless. I have drive. I have stubborn fierce pride. Is this the hunger Gitur always said she saw in me?_   
  
_We’ll be testing it soon. The whole Vahn will be put to the test, I think. A messenger found our column today, riding a lathered horse, half-dead of hard riding. A youngish chestnut-haired Nord woman in a scarf of Stormcloak blue, a half-dozen javelins fixed to her saddle and a shortish sword at her belt. She too looked lean and fretful with the speed of her journey, but her eyes were wide and sharp with the message she brought._   
  
_The fyrds have met resistance. Have spent time split and rooting out the warbands of the Rift’s petty warlords, bringing some under the banner and sending others skittering off to shy in the shadows of stronger lords._   
  
_Ulfric Stormcloak and the second fyrd march to Riften, the capital, to speak to a counsel of the new-rich and what few warlords are willing to listen._   
  
_The first fyrd – the Iron-Root fyrd – remains in the field. Outmanoeuvred, it faces a pitched battle or else a slow death by small stinging raids. It will pay for aid._


	25. Chapter 25

Even the sea’s flat face has waves and troughs for ships to clamber and course down. But the Rift had no folds, no rises, no vantage except the horizon’s stark steady level. It stole perspective, made seeing strange and senseless. Nothing low and nothing high, the distance seemed endlessly far but empty and curtailed before long. It dropped off into nothing. Every league was an island, surrounded by an immensity of sky.  
  
They saw the battle an hour or more before they could reach it. No mercy in the land to spare them from that. A bristling of darkish shapes against the ocean of grass, the spindly seldom trees. They’d picked up their pace, hurrying just below the brink that’d set them panting, sweating, tiring themselves before the real work began.  
  
Then they stood, resting a moment. The whole Vahn heaved tense from two days’ forced march, half an hour’s run, gait set hard at a loping trot. The column had blurred and softened forward. They stood in short ranks, curving in to watch. They stared past Antolios, pacing in front of them.  
  
And Simra was ablaze. His skin stickled and murmured, shifting uneasy on his bones. A sick starvation aside from hunger lurked past the back of his neck, carried on lower, bellyward and beyond. He jostled amidst shoulders, and remembered crowds at hanging, hand-loppings, slaughterday markets. He thought a dozen thoughts at once and a dozen more burnt in the background. Through the Vahn’s close knit, he was close enough now to see.  
  
Spears wavered standing up high. Streaks of black screamed arcs through the air. Seen from above there might’ve been some plan to it. A line bending back on itself, like a selfbow draws from straight to curved. A circle like the bulwark the Vahn had taught itself to make, bristling with polearms to ward off a charge, and cobbled with shields to shrug off javelins and arrows. If there had been hills, woods, valleys to portion and pare up the country, at least they would’ve been spared the sight of it a while. But the Rift was the Rift, and the fighting was close but a thousand heartbeats away.  
  
“No time for speeches,” Antolios began, trying to hide how near-breathless he was. “We’re not late yet, but nor are we early. We’ve got a job to do, and it’s there, waiting!”  
  
He walked to Ra’baali’s cart. All eyes were on him now, brim full of heed or questions. Antolios pried in the baggage and cargo a moment, then brought out a fluttering shatter of colour. The Vahn’s banner billowed in the Rift’s longdrawn wind.  
  
Behind it, a thrumming thicket of moving shapes beat and beat round a solid center. Riders, Simra thought, cold and nervously clear. Riders wheeling round a shieldwall, trying to find purchase.  
  
“They’ve made a wheel, turning round the fyrd, looking for weakness,” Antolios said. “We go in at the flank, the wheel will break but only for a moment. Then they’ll be on us too, circling around us. We strike as hard as we can in the charge, then we hold firm. Between us and the fyrd, we split their forces, grind them to dust, scatter them on the wind. Am I clear?”  
  
There was a moment’s difficult silence. Then cries. Bellowing. Some came as words and threats, oaths to follow, shouts of agreement. Some were like the shrieks and howls of animals: a yellow-toothed rise of noise as warriors in the Vahn’s ranks begged the battleblood into their veins.  
  
Antolios held the banner in one hand. The wind whipped it, leashed-dog eager, in echo of the Vahn rallied round it. In his other arm he cradled a helmet. Low-browed, skull-domed it was crowned front-to-back with a high ridge that spurred down to protect the nose. Angled guard-plates fixed down to cover the cheeks, both scratched deliberate, as if to remove or hide something. His armour was a sleeveless shirt of mail, folding out from the neck to span a round ruff of chain to his shoulders. It was overlayed at the chest with a harness of dull-gleaming enamel scales in sea-blue and chipped white. Plate was strapped tight to his arms and legs, the diamond of his shield slung over his back.  
  
There was something to him that trapped Simra into listening and looking. Everything fixated him. The world was stitched out of details and Antolios stood at its hub, gleaming with them. He raised the helmet onto his head, strapped it at his chin, covered his dark curls. And he looked at the Vahn. A look that seemed to lock eyes with them all at once. And Simra clung to that gaze, trusting, like a half-drowned castaway clings to driftwood.  
  
“Ra’baali,” Antolios began firmly, stretching his voice into the Vahn’s new silence. “Clovis, Chioma. Moridene and Simra…You’ll form the camp-guard. Cover our rear, retreat to the edge of those woods. Keep watch of the supply carts and pitch camp for when we return. Clovis, be ready to tend any who might be wounded. The rest of you? With me!”  
  
Antolios had said his name. And for a moment it had been close as touching, like sewing something into his skin. Then whatever the stitches were, Antolios tore them loose. Simra was left open, empty and bare. The rising eager fear lurched up, then off to dwindle into nothing. A blush glared hot in his cheeks.  
  
The others were already breaking into a run. The charge began. The five that remained stood by the cart, watching each other. The horse and mules twitched their tails and, shifted their flanks, as indifferent now as when Ra’baali urged them into motion again.  
  
Simra began to walk. His hands ached sudden round the wooden staff he’d cut for himself the night before. But now the white was fading from his knuckles, and the seasick glow that came after fighting was setting in with no fanfare or fierceness to justify it.  
  
Moridene stumped along beside him, three feet sounding out in her gait. The two soles of her boots, and then the occasional tamp of the weapon she’d lugged all this way only to let it go unused. It was a glaive – a broad steel blade, hooked vicious along its back edge, and riveted onto a longish shaft – but the wooden haft had been cut to her size, and its off-end was bound with leather strips, bandaged like an amputed limb. Light overlaps of mismatched plate armour rubbed and chinked with her movements. Angled pauldrons and greaves; knee-guards, a strapped-on scrap of iron for her left thigh, and loose trousers frilled irregular underneath.  
  
Every detail now felt like a thorn hooked in Simra’s hide. Walking the world was like struggling through a hedgerow, headlong, snagging himself at every step. Even next to Moridene’s patchwork battlegear, he felt naked and stupid. He was childish, foolish in his messy-mended aketon and goatskin mantle. The knife at his belt wasn’t even a real knife. All he had was an irregular unstraight staff in one hand, in idiot imitation of Moridene’s glaive.  
  
The carts and wagon were laden higher and heavier than usual, burdened up with the excess baggage of all the Vahn who were travelling battle-light. The rear-guard trundled lumpen across the expanse and toward the ragged treeline of skinny slim-trunked shrubs.  
  
“Not today, Moridene,” she said in a low hum. The sound had none of her usual crow and bluster. It was deflated, its usual accent laying deeper roots, spreading the vowels long and tired. “Sure, you’ll get your chance someday. Just not today…”  
  
Simra looked over, jerk-necked quick. Talk surprised him in itself, as much as the talker did. Her head was hung. Her hair fell in wisps and tattered curtains, half-hiding her face though she’d tried to tie it back.  
  
“It’s a hard thing to tell someone,” he ventured. “Not tonight. Not today. It’s a problem when every fucking day is a today.”  
  
“Least if they said ‘never’ they’d be saying what they meant…”  
  
Simra cracked part of a smile. It faded as soon as the timeworn tightness gave its first sharp tug through the scarred corner of his mouth, making the look awkward and twisted from one corner outward. Moridene was fumbling impatient at the ties and buckles of her armour. She sloughed off a pauldron, bent to scrabble off a shinguard, and chucked them unceremonious into the wagon.  
  
“Not like I’ll be needin you,” she muttered. “Or you. Mmh, and fuck you too.” But there was the start of a laugh in her voice. “Not today!”  
  
With fingers suddenly clumsy, Simra unbuttoned his aketon and let it hang open. Pulses of foolish anger began and ended in his breast, minute by minute. Every time, a kind of sigh-sounding relief drowned them out, guttered them down.  
  
The wagon bumped and stopped among the trees.  
  
Ra’baali let go a snarling wail that carried on a moment before it became words. “Stop running at the mouth and push! Mafala Clan-Mother save Ra’baali from roots and snags and low-hanging star-cursed branches!” She hopped from the wagon’s seat and took up by the bump-stopped wheel.  
  
Simra and Moridene joined her, set their shoulders to the overladen cart.   
  
The wind gusted. In snatches it told them of what they’d left behind. The sound of steel, screaming horses, humanoid voices. The reek of smoke and an oversweet hanging savour that smelt like a split lip tastes. Simra looked back once and saw only what he’d seen before: a chaos of shapes and sound.


	26. Chapter 26

 

 

_Near dusk the fighters came back. We lost no-one outright, not in the fighting, but few came back unscathed. The battle had marked everyone in some way or another, even if only in the flat exhaustion of their faces, the forced trudge of their gaits._  
  
 _Five were badly wounded. Before the recall, Clovis paced then sat, ordered and reordered his tools on mats under a wide-eaved tree, silver barked and skinny limbed. By the time he set to work he went about it like the work was a relief. Not a pleasure though. Everything about him is ascetic, particular, grounded. Tireless, joyless, mind sharp and dry as a papercut. He worked through each case methodical and mechanical. No time for compassion when there’s curing to be done. He shored down the worst dangers – dispassionate and easy as kicking dirt over the quiet peril of a fire – then turned to the next, and the next._  
  
 _I helped a little. At first I was useful. In clipped tones he told me what to do, and I mulched willowbark for poultices, mixed simples with spirits for draughts and tinctures. He canted out chants like they were nothing but shop-lists, no strain or tenor to his voice. But even stripped of drama, they were spells. Gleams of dull golden light that sank beneath the skin of the wounded, pooled like quicksilver in their broken flesh. Clever, chilling, beautiful stuff._  
  
 _He asked if I knew any healing spells — Restoration magicks, or even hedge-charms of calming or curing. And I wanted to lie. No, I wanted to be able to tell a different truth from the truth I had to give. Looking at the wounded gave me a teetering kind of fear: a brinksome worry, knowing they were balanced between survival and slow death. I wanted to be able to help stopper up that feeling. But I’ve always been better at breaking than mending._  
  
 _“No,” I said. “Never had the chance to learn.”_  
  
“Then go with Ra’baali,” Antolios said. “What she’s got to do now, you’ve done before.”  
  
The Nibenese commander of the Vahn was restless. He hadn’t sat down or stopped moving — not since coming back from the fighting. Walking between the low-lain wounded, passing one mercenary or another and leaving a small rigid snatch of praise in their care. He watched and looked, like his gaze alone could brings things to order, make a working mechanism out of the battleworn, the wounded, and their hurry to set camp. Even when he stayed in one place, he bent at the waist and shed off his armour. And in a fever of small motions, he buffed the blood and dirt from his equipment, piece by piece.  
  
“You’re good at it too, if I recall correctly,” he said, voice flat and clipped. “She’s going to pick over the field. Best to do it sooner than later, before the crows come to do the same.”  
  
“And before the stench starts,” Ra’baali added. She was draped with sacks and bags, covering her thick as a rough-cloth coat. She came wheeling an empty handcart between resting warriors, unfurled bedrolls, flasks and bottles and surgeon’s tools.  
  
Simra rose from where he’d hunched himself, between the writhing grey roots of the tree Clovis had claimed. He went to where he’d lain his own baggage and bedroll, and gathered up a motley of needful things. Satchel and gathersack, mantle to keep off the night-carried cold.  
  
A man bit back a groan, bleeding into his own bedroll. In the fighting he’d taken a blade to the meat of his thigh. Now he sat, hunched protective over his injury, rocking on the base of his sit-bones. Another man lay stripped to the waist and bandaged thickly all round his chest. He had his ribcage to thank for stopping a javelin short of his heart and lungs, but the weight of the shaft in the shallow wound had wrenched the barbed head free, making a mess of his flesh before it let go. The poultice he wore was one of Simra’s, though Clovis had applied it.  
  
Clovis had already let Simra go. His whole attention was on his newest patient. A Nord woman, she sat dazed and eerie-still, with blood clotted in her dull-golden hair. Her helmet had saved her from a rider’s hammer, but the blow had still stuttered her brains, staggered her vision. Clovis was working to bring her back to herself.  
  
“Quick quick,” Ra’baali said. “The pickings will not stay very rich for very long.”  
  
She let go the handcart and strode on through the thinning trees, towards the plain, the last scraps of sunset, and the battlefield. Simra took the cart by the splay of its handles and trundled after her. Hurrying feet, scuffing boots, the plaint of one rickety wheel, whining like hurdygurd’s drone-string, ready to snap.  
  
The sky was awash with colour. Rust and gold, copper gleams and strays of pewter cloud, muddled brazen and forging together. But the evening was turning quick into night. Soon every colour overhead would meld and cool, black as iron.  
  
The site of the battle was a stain of rough shadows, churned uneven ground that broke the Rift’s stark flatness. Already lights bobbed like marshfires between the clots and lumps of shape and shade. They were warm colours mostly – candles and lamps – but here and there floated a cold wisp of magelight, glimmering like small sombre stars. Under them, figures hunched to the ground quick and hungry. Like potato-diggers turning over the field for bone-yellow roots to fill their Winter stores. Here they stooped for salvage.  
  
“D’you want a light?” Simra asked Ra’baali.  
  
She didn’t respond. Like she hadn’t heard him over the sound of her hurrying, her purposeful stride. Simra shrugged, cupped his hands, called his own magelight. It rose like thistlefluff above his head, ignoring the wind. By its glow he spotted the first corpse. Not the first the battle had made maybe, but the first he’d seen up close.  
  
It was a pony, riderless, lustrous-dark beneath a coating of dust. Its legs had buckled under it, head angled awkward against the ground. Its sides were raw and scabbed with stale blood, and the stubby jut of three arrowshafts had broken off in its flank.  
  
Ra’baali had stopped to look. Simra glanced from the horse to her, asking an unspoken question with his eyebrows.  
  
“No,” she said after a moment’s thought. “In Winter maybe. But the day has been warm, and the beast has suffered too much. Its meat would taste of fear and pain, and Ra’baali does not have enough salt or spice to mask that.”  
  
Simra snorted humourless through his nose. Regardless, he wheeled the handcart closer, crouched by the dead beast’s side. If this was one of the Rift ponies Kjeld had warned him about, it looked much the same as any other horse he’d seen. Motion might make it different. A rider might change his response.  
  
A saddle of quilted cloth and carved wood – leaves and vines and winged insects maybe, woven together in the pattern – hugged stiff to the horse’s back. The saddle itself was too bulky to be worth its weight, but a pannier hung from it, hunkered to the horse’s side like a goitre. It looked heavy with something. Simra took the makeshift knife from his sash and slit the saddlebag open. A spiral ring of cured sausage bundled out, shocking at first as guts from a breached belly. But he took a sack from Ra’baali, and stowed the coil in his cart.  
  
“Good,” she said with a small nod. “Better to find food than barter, or weapons, or armour. The Vahn cannot eat shields, spears, and trinkets.”  
  
 _From our scouring of the field, the Vahn gained mostly useful things. Weapons, helmets, shields that could be repaired and repurposed. Half a dozen different kinds of arrowheads – sharp straight little bodkins, wicked fork-tongues of iron, serrated jags and hooky barbs – to trade on, or refit and refletch. A sack of dried beans, a feedbag of millet, strips of thin brittle wind-dried meat. A few measures of what I reckoned to be alchemy but couldn’t identify._  
  
 _But there were other pretty things too that I wouldn’t let go. We could trade them, I reasoned. They were coin in uncoined shape. Finger-rings of brass, bone, polished stone. Arm-rings of dark iron, silverleafed horn. A flask of sour bracing spirit I sniffed but didn’t dare drink. A carved flute. Amulets for protection, amulets dedicating deaths to the gods, snapped from throats, each swollen with their last breaths. Strings of smooth painted beads, and baubles of faint-fragrant resins._  
  
 _I took away bitter things. Bitter feelings, bitter learnings._  
  
 _Ra’baali showed me how to slit a wound to salvage out an arrowhead, intact from the hole it’s made. She told me there are few kinds of coin you can rely on in every land, but there are fewer places still that won’t value a purse jingling with arrowheads of good iron, steel, or stranger more special things. She told me to be wary while I comb and scavenge places like this. Other scavengers get territorial – true – but battlefields attract worse things than people. Hungry things._  
  
 _Lessons are valuable in themselves, I suppose. Nearly all knowledge is. And I took a few slivers of treasure from the hoard. A string of smooth red beads I wear now round one wrist, and a pouch of rocksalt. But I can’t help the weedy tangle of thoughts that’ve grown round that day’s doings._  
  
 _I needn’t have had glory, the honour of a growing name. And that’s meet enough, because I doubt I’d have won either in one battle — my first, I suppose. I needn’t even have had my share of the crumbs of praise Antolios gave out to those who fought by his side. No need to impress him, or the others, or anyone else. But I’d have liked the chance to know my own worth, and find it something other than wanting. I’d have liked the Vahn to reckon me something more than the ragpicker I’ve been since the days I spent in Soraya’s shadow._  
  
 _Ra’baali at least wasn’t as dismissive of me after that night. She lied though about the smell. No foaming teeming throat-sour reek of rot hung on the field. But spilt blood, opened bellies have an awful pungent keen all their own. Before the flies, the crows, the wolves and foxes, that smell hung over the plain like a fog. I tried to use my cleaning cantrip, leave myself scenting only of rainwater again, but I think I still smell it on me. I long for a pond, a stream — somewhere I can rinse and wash the ordinary way, and scrub till I smell only of soap and scoured skin._  
  
 _It’s been three nights now since the battle and the scavenging that came after. I’ve slept poorly on each one, and taken to sitting awake. I listen to the wind, the leaves that grow new on the trees, at least when there are trees to hear. I write by magelight, and borrow the dying heat of each evening’s cookfires to brew myself pots of pinesmoked tea, and drink it, wishing for honey to sweeten its tang. Because I think details of the battlefield have gotten stained into my mind, like the smell I’m sure still clings to my skin._  
  
 _Corpses tangled in ditches dug by their fighting. By scuffing boots trying to hold a line hard and firm against the hooves of horses. Broken spears splintering up from deathlocked hands. The bodies of ponies and people, twisted beyond the limits of their anatomy. My hands, working iron rings from where they were woven in the blood-clotted beard of a half-beheaded man._  
  
 _I tried not to see the carnage. I’d felt the horror of it before, and wouldn’t let it carry me off as it did back then. I tried to be practical, seeing what good could still come of the grimness._  
  
 _But I also remember some sights clearer and crueller than what had been done to bodies by blades and axes and arrows, and the trample of horses. I remember the wounds left by magic. Mages on our side, or on theirs? No telling, as the victims were hard to recognise. Bodies blackened and wizened with frostbite, I think, shrunken like wind-dried meat against their bones. Bodies blasted by worse things still, wracked by them._  
  
 _And in our camp was a man whose mind had been shattered by magic, though his body was mostly unharmed. Thoughts sown with shapeless terrors that welled up from nothing, then turned to gibbering sobs and screams. Clovis needed two other fighters to restrain him as he cast a calming spell.  Even now, the man still shakes and whimpers time to time, like he’s also remembering the things he saw._

 


	27. Chapter 27

_Rain’s Hand. The 14th of the month?_  
  
_When I worked the docks with my father, something washed up onto the shores of Windhelm’s rivermouth. An enormous living thing, but beached as it was, a corpse waiting to happen. It was a leviathan. And over the months, what began as a monolith became a monument to its ruin, and a feast for the claws of crabs and beaks of birds._  
  
_The fyrd’s camp set me remembering it, clear and keen as a glass-shard alley-knife. The Iron-Root fyrd’s become something like that leviathan. Coming apart on all sides since the day it was mustered in that hinterland valley beyond the pass Siska, Vesh, Kjeld and Shora called home._  
  
_Encamped immense on the plain, the fyrd limped only a little ways from the battlefield before it collapsed to lick its wounds, tend its wounded. And like an island in this sea of grass, the Vahn has washed up on its shores. We’re pressed to stay a while, marooned, as Antolios negotiates payment for our support in the battle._  
  
_I reckoned it’d be a simple thing. A chest or sack of coin for the Vahn’s lump sum, doled to each and all, according to the terms of their contract. I’d have my first half-share in straightforward silver, and the Vahn would move on, in search of its next commission._  
  
_But nothing in the world’s that uncomplicated, least of all the running of an army. Instead Antolios and Ra’baali argue endlessly with endless delegations of fyrdmen, hornblowers, linecallers and shieldbearers, cutting their way toward a fair deal. They fight over rates of exchange, proportionate values, costs and profits. Lists upon lists of demands and compromises, of the dozens upon dozens of things that can stand in for coin._  
  
_Casks of ale and stocks of smoked fish. Oats and barley and salt. Iron in sundry shapes from nails to axe-bits to spearheads. Ra’baali warns Antolios away from accepting offers of fine things for barter. No pelts, no amber, no ivory. For these things to have value, she says, you need a place and a chance to trade them. She drives toward things that will feed and supply the Vahn as a whole. But he steers for things that will pay the Vahn as individuals. There’s compromise to be made between them, as well as with the speakers for the fyrd._  
  
_I know the terms they talk in, and know the offers they’ve rejected. They needed a scriv for their lists and bills, counting and accounting. I offered to help, penning the Vahn’s path to payment._  
  
_Only force of ideals or force of arms hold the fyrd together. Some are enough enamoured with Ulfric and his hopes for Skyrim that they’d follow any banner he’s so much as winked at. Others, I remember, are conscripts, pressed from their fields and forges, their crafts and their families._  
  
_The wounded lie by in their scores, lined up and limb-lost in the open, under the barren miserable sun. Delirious wretched shambles of men and women. And those reckoned battle-ready are little better. Dented helms and shoddy-mended spears and shields, farmtools turned unwilling to war. Disease is rife and wounds fester. It can only be some twisted twig of Nordic honour that keeps desertion low._  
  
_I hang daily between pity, disgust, and loathing for the fyrd itself. My heart’s too full of all three to feel any but one at once. So I veer, and swerve from one to the next and onward, and my moods are strange here. I suppose I’m thankful for the scrivwork, keeping me and my mind occupied._

 

“Who’re you with?”  
  
The quartermaster’s voice was bored. Still Simra felt the Nord’s lax eyes on him, drinking him in reluctant as medicine. Rust coloured aketon, held together with stitches; boots stained with mud, and under that the salty marks left behind by snow; pale brown lindenbast trousers, calfwrapped tight and soft with wear; patchwork particoloured scarf. Not a scrap of Stormcloak blue to mark him out as the fyrd’s.  
  
“The Red Vahn,” said Simra. “I’m scriv to commander Antolios. Errand boy too, when it suits him. Boss asked me to come collect some of our dues.”  
  
Simra gave a sheepish half-smile, snatched a moment’s meeting of eyes from the quartermaster, then looked away, glancing furtive into the tent behind the Nord. Shadows and angular shapes crammed in disorder beyond the door-flap.  
  
The Nord paused a moment. Jaw set as if to start chewing, he weighed Simra’s words. He was sturdy-built with wiry dust-brown hair. The kind of man whose bones were broad, whose arms were thick to their foundations. Months of scarce food and ill health couldn’t change that, but they’d thinned his hair and creased the face round his watery blue eyes.  
  
“That’s pay-chest business, not mine,” he finally grunted.  
  
“Not when the pay-chest’s empty it’s not,” Simra carried on, smiling a crooked wheedling smile. “You and I both know there’s not a coin to pay us. Not you, not me, not a poor fuck among us, no matter if you wear a red rune or a blue cloak. But we all do as we’re told, right?”  
  
Simra stole another glance into the big Nord’s face. Like forging a chain from small suggestions, binding them together with shared complaints, shared burdens, the downward press from those above. Or so Simra hoped.  
  
“So?”  
  
“So,” said Simra. “Payment in kind, right? No coin, so you’re getting away with goods and services.”  
  
The Nord looked flat, impassive, more tired than before.  
  
“Look,” Simra began, apologetic. “I’ve got writs and everything, if you need to see.”  
  
He fished in his satchel and brought out a few pages of folded parchment. Crabbed black with ink, he shook them briefly in front of the Nord. They were only the lists and notes from Ra’baali and Antolios’ last negotiations, but Simra hoped they’d work as a gambit in his favour. If the quartermaster didn’t have the time or the heart to read them. Or better, if he couldn’t read them at all…  
  
“Right, right,” the quartermaster sighed, “what’s your tithe?”  
  
“A bushel of beans or peas, one of pork, salted lean or fatback, whatever you’ve got.” Simra’s thoughts raced. He faked a look down at the sheets in his hand while his imagination drew breath. “An ell of bandage cloth…two casks of strongbeer or twice as many of mild…three pottles of pinepitch...” He carried on till he saw he’d gone just a half-inch too far. “Or, three decent blades and a dozen arrows.” Simra shrugged noncommittal while his heart beat fit to bruise against his ribs. “Like I said, whatever you’ve got.”

 

 _A single-edged longknife, shortish with a jutting chisel for its tip, simple blocky wood for a grip. Another long and broad-bladed, nearly round where the point should’ve been, a shapeless horsechestnut for its pommel. The last was neither too short nor too long – a touch over two feet in the blade, perhaps – with a brief forward curve to its short and simple iron guard, a worn binding of pale-blue cloth on its grip — tapered fierce towards its point, and with a metal halfmoon for its pommel._  
  
_I had my pick of the three and chose the last. I liked its dull-coloured darkish blade, and how it reminded me of my father’s old sword, its iron marled with ebony. I liked the pale wood of its scabbard, clothbound at intervals like a book-cover. The other two, and the arrows, I could give to Ra’baali without missing them, but that one I kept for my own._  
  
_I’ve thrown away the staff I cut for myself. It’s one more thing to carry. A sword is something you can wear till it becomes as much a part of you as your teeth, your nails._  
  
_For all her talk of food and warmth over weapons and armour, Ra’baali was pleased with my donation. She asked where I got the blades, the arrows, but more out of cattish curiosity than concern._  
  
_“Ingenuity,” I said. “And maybe a bit of luck.”_  
  
_The next day – today – the Vahn took its pay and detached from the camp. Like a barnacle careened from the hull of a rotting boat. I had the half-share my contract afforded me, not in cold coin but in sundries and oddments._  
  
_A few feet of woven rawhide rope. Three needles of carved bone, for fixing hair or knitting wool, I can’t quite figure which. A length of cloth too coarse for bandages but too fine for footwraps — I’ve managed to fiddle it into a makeshift fastening, to bind my sword’s scabbard onto my sash and hang it at my side. A few drams of pinepitch in a covered clay pot. A fist-sized lump of salted fatback. And fourpence in Nordic copper._  
  
_If not for the sword I guiled for myself, I think I’d feel cheated. Things as they are, I’m only pleased to be moving once more._

 

Clovis wouldn’t tell him what the words meant. They chained together like poetry, each sound lending off into the next syllable, but they weren’t like verse as Simra knew it. None of the near-nonsense melody and music of what he’d read in Dunmeris and in translation: meditative forms, landscape lyric for a lost country. Nor the thrum and throb of alliteration, consonants clashing rhythmic, like in Nordic battle-hymns and half-prosed histories.  
  
“It’s a mantra,” said Clovis impatiently. “Altmeris, if you really must know, though an old branch of it. No-one I’ve ever known speaks it except when they don’t want to be understood. The mantras are most of what keeps it alive.”  
  
“What’s a mantra?” asked Simra, liking the return to Skyrim’s Tamrielic. It felt good to wrap his voice round familiar sounds. The chant he was learning had bent it out of shape over its open meowing vowels, complex compound throat-sounds.  
  
“A tool,” Clovis sighed. “For focusing the mind and magicka. Beyond that, all it means is that the sense of the words don’t matter. You just need to learn the noise of them. That they pertain to the body – your own body – its rhythms and cycles, reminding them how they work and coaxing them back to normal. Healing stuff.”  
  
Simra cleared his throat, clicked and rolled his jaw, loosening it again to be trialled by an unfamiliar tongue. Brow furrowed, he laboured through the twelve strange syllables, reciting from rote.  
  
“Stop,” Clovis interrupted him at the seventh. “Stop there, then start where you left off, coming round to there again. Circles. Cycles. The mantra doesn’t have a beginning or an end inherent in its words. Just the word you choose to begin on, and where you choose to end.”  
  
The wagon rolled beneath them and the skies rolled by overhead. The Vahn was on the move again, to the tune of trudging feet. There were three more pairs now. Six more boots trod flat the hardy grass, and six more sets of steps turned the ground of the plains to dust. A clutch of scouts from the fyrd, they’d stitched themselves into the fabric of the Vahn amidst the ruin and squalor of the bigger army’s camp, and the leagues they’d travelled since hadn’t shaken them loose. Slim tireless looking men and one woman, gaunt-faced, long in the stride.  
  
Clovis had snapped and twittered till Ra’baali permitted him and Simra a ride in the wagon. The rhythm of walking, he said, would interfere at first. Simra unhitched and wore out his voice, but was thankful for the chance to rest his travel-sore feet. He went through the mantra three more times, starting at random in the chain of syllables, trying to rivet them circular.  
  
“Where does the magic come in?” he finally asked. “It’s just like learning a little song otherwise. Not even a pretty one. I know how to do it. Sort of dredge and pull and the magic comes and fills the shape your spell’s made for it, right? And why’re you teaching me to heal myself? I’ll still be fucking useless when the next batch of wounded get chewed up and spat our way.”  
  
Clovis fixed Simra with a bored stare. It grew stiffer with every question till Simra trailed off, feeling younger than he was, and several times more foolish.  
  
“If you’re finished..?” Clovis said.  
  
Simra nodded.  
  
“No matter who’s teaching it, you’ll learn Restoration magic the same way. Start at home. Your own body is the first reference you have for how to work magic on anyone else’s. I don’t have time for an anatomy lesson, and for this mantra you won’t need one, but start with yourself and you’ll thank me later. One way or another. As for the magic. Are you hurt, Simra?”  
  
Simra shook his head.  
  
“Then it’d be magicka wasted. There’s nothing for the spell to fix. You’d do more harm than good by reaching into the rhythms of your body and telling them, ‘stop slacking and get to work!’ Do you even know what a self-wasting response—…Of course you don’t. Now. Any more questions?”  
  
Cowed, Simra shook his head again, and went back to the mantra. He chanted till his jaw ached, his throat constricted. But the words and how to chain them together came natural as any poetry.


	28. Chapter 28

 

 

Antolios finished his cup of watered strongbeer. He never could drink ale without grimacing. The look gurned customary across his face, then faded. He set down his cup on the folding table, nearly triumphant, like emptying it was an ordeal he’d endured.  
  
“Can you ride at all?” he asked, across the table, and its clutter of spread-eagled compasses, shreds of cheapmade maps, the finger-thin furls of scrolls and missives.  
  
The question came from nowhere, too abrupt to be innocent. It surprised Simra that he’d thought to ask at all. The answer already seemed so obvious, such a foregone thing.  
  
“What,” said Simra, “you mean, like, horses? Piss on that!” He choked out the start of a laugh.  
  
Antolios wasn’t even smiling. His face was flat, unmoved. His eyes were very dark, seamed with faint but well-worn lines, more to do with frowning than laughter. Only the light of his oil-lamp glinted there. No sign of a joke or a glimmer of humour.  
  
“When would I have learnt?” Simra hurried to say. “Where and how and on what? S’not exactly a skill that comes natural with any of my past job descriptions, is it?”  
  
“You’ve worked any number of odd jobs in the past,” said Antolios. “I thought perhaps you might have spent some time as a stablehand. Or an ostler maybe.”  
  
“In Windhelm?” Simra kissed his teeth. “The Nords’re too quick to peg us for horse-thieves to let us so much as shovel shit in their stables. It’s about six different kinds of stupid, but it’s not like we complain. The Nords keep their shit-shovelling to themselves? Joke’s on them. Makes a change…”  
  
“Horse-thieving…” Antolios lowered a fine-boned hand, drummed his fingernails against the side of his cup. They rattled there like windchimes. “That was my other hope. A reason you might have had to sit a saddle at some point in your life.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“To my suggestion of horse-theft? I meant no offence. Forget I said anything.”  
  
“No,” said Simra firmly. “As in no to riding, and no to horses, and no to any blighted commingling of the two.”  
  
His face was flushed, across the bridge of his nose, across his cheeks, and on to the tips of his ears. A thin haze of drink had settled misty in his mind. He was talking too much to be saying anything worth saying, but talking too much to stop now.  
  
“So the problem is with horses,” said Antolios, “and not the riding itself?”  
  
“Might be. But I mean…anything that’s dangerous and mal-fucking-odorous at both ends. And as big and strong as it’s stupid. And so expensive it’d be cheaper just to feed them coins than buy the amount of feed they chew through every fucking day. And they don’t know where they are and aren’t meant to shit. Trusting in something like that? It doesn’t seem right. I just—…I mean it’s not—…I don’t—”  
  
“—Actually know anything about the poor beasts?” Antolios offered.  
  
Simra kissed his teeth again, louder this time. His throat gave a small noise of disgust, but it turned quick to a sigh of admission. “Something like that,” he muttered. “Maybe. But to answer your first fucking question? No. I can’t fucking ride one.”  
  
A small rolling clatter counted the moments of silence. Antolios was drumming his fingernails again. Pensive, he looked past Simra. Past the cookfires and campfires the Vahn had set for the night, off into the darkness of the plain.  
  
“I suppose it doesn’t matter very much,” he said to himself quietly. “Might even be better. Fewer horses…”  
  
“…You fucking what?” Simra slurred.  
  
“No matter. It’s nothing you need to concern yourself over. Not tonight.”  
  
“Clearly it’s something I’m gonna have to concern myself over at some point though,” Simra growled under his breath.  
  
“Go to bed, Simra. Early start tomorrow. You’ll need your rest.”  
  
Antolios dismissed him. Simra drained his cup, left it empty on the table, and sidled off through the camp. Between pools of failing firelight, the dark shapes of mercenaries already sleeping as best they could. It was best to tread lightly, go all but unseen if he could. No knowing who in the Vahn he’d stumble into. Everyone seemed as likely to have a bone to pick with him as they were to pat him on the back these days, and he felt adrift on the uneasy sea of knowing it.  
  
Sitting on his bedroll, drink fuming softly in his skull, Simra scolded himself. Thinking Antolios would summon him to his hobble-legged little wartable for no reason save to share three cups of beer and a few scraps of talk. Thinking the commander would water his own beer and leave Simra’s strong out of nothing but generosity. Thinking now for all he was worth, but finding himself no wiser as to what any of it meant, or what Antolios had planned. He should have known better. On all counts, he should have known better.  
  
“And you’re meant to be fucking clever,” he muttered to himself darkly, unpeeling his boots, laying himself down to sleep. “Cleverish. Maybe just cleverish…”

...  
  
 _That morning was no kind of morning at all. More like a long grey stretch of not-quite-dawn that for hours outstayed its welcome. The patterns of my sleep are irregular by now, and have been for months. No matter when I wake, or how much or how little sleep I get, it never feels natural. No pleasure in it. And that morning Siska helped me wakeful, prodding me in the ribs with the blunt toe of her rawhide boot._  
  
 _“Not that I don’t appreciate it,” I groaned. “You making sure I don’t miss out on breakfast or whatever the fuck it is you think you’re doing. But I can get myself up just fine without. Y’know, like I have every other day before this one?”_  
  
 _Or perhaps I didn’t say so much, or in so many words. Her response either way was the same:_  
  
 _“Shit on breakfast and shit on sleep. There’s important things afoot. You’re called. We all are.”_  
  
 _She jabbed me again. Under her gaze I fumbled out of my bedroll, onto the dew-damp ground. I struggled with my boots till they were snug to my feet, wrenched the aketon over my tunic for warmth. Bleary eyes and bleary mind, but I was thinking clear enough to want to clear up both. I sloshed water from my skin and two pinches of dark smoked tea together into my kettle’s potbelly. Kettle and cup, I carried them with me to join the rest of the Vahn._  
  
 _Somewhere the sun was rising, but the eastern sky was too misty to let the light be known. Near enough all of the Vahn teemed a crescent round last night’s biggest cookfire. Chioma stirred porridge in his big iron pot, same as ever. And all of us were washed disperse in off-white light, rubbing our eyes, holding worries high above our headaches._  
  
 _A tension hung over us all. And though I tried to ignore it – sitting by the ashes of a smaller fire, whispering it into a low-murmuring glow, nestling my teapot against its heat – all eyes were on Antolios, stood beside Chioma and Ra’baali. Whatever he had to say, I think, we were all praying the same prayer to two-dozen different gods and godlessnesses: Let it have no bearing on me._  
  
 _But when’s any god or ghost ever marked any prayer of mine?_  
  
“You’ll have noticed the Vahn has had guests recently,” Antolios said. His voice was resonant: the one he used for speeches and not just speaking.  
  
Simra glanced through the crescent-shaped crowd, all sitting and squatting on toad-damp grass. The guests sat together, towards the front of their mass. Three slim wind-worn Nords – scouts from the first fyrd – two men and one woman in thick blue all-weather cloaks. His weren’t the only eyes upon them. A crow groomed its feathers on the woman’s cloaked shoulder. One of its eyes, Simra reckoned, was watching him right back.  
  
“They’ve been with us since the fyrd,” Antolios said, “attached to ensure open lines of communication between us and our employer. Now, just lately I received a missive from command in Riften. It’s an order for three of us to detach for a bit of independent work…”  
  
“Get to the point,” groaned Steel-Eye from the front of the audience. “Motherbear Mara’s mercy, tell us what they want us to do and who’ll be doing it!”  
  
A nervous ripple of laughter quickened through the crowd, then quelled itself an instant later.  
  
“The Vahn-proper are to continue patrolling the plain, rooting out enemy warbands, bleeding out their will to resist. Attrition, pure and simple. But we’re also to provide three good hardened mercenaries to follow our friends from the fyrd on another directive. They’ll find and make contact with a certain warlord of the Rift, ensure his allegiance to our side, or else make sure he won’t be hitching himself to any other cause, making trouble down the line. Am I understood?”  
  
The crowd nodded stiff in silent assent. In the dim diffuse light, Antolios glowed with surety, necessity, just as he had before the battle. Dread and admiration snapped and wrestled in Simra’s chest. He remembered how he’d been caught up in the commander’s presence, and how it had cast him off, bruised and crushed him. He was wary of it now, scared to hope, like seeing the shimmer of clear and clean water across the dunes of a desert.  
  
“Good,” said Antolios firmly. “As for names? Steel-Eye, I remember you were hungry for a little independent glory.” A rare flash of teeth. Antolios was smiling.  
  
Steel-Eye shook his head, shoulders murmurous with motion. He breathed deep, mustering himself, then surged to his feet, roaring. “No! It’s bad enough I find myself following a perfumed little heartlander like you. But lead me to battle now and then, I’ll follow. But this! This is too much, Antolios! You think you’ve got the balls and bile to tell me – Krasimir Steel-Eye! Steel-Eye of the Bloody Ford! – to run you an errand? Like some milksop diplomat! Your running-dog!”  
  
The mass was noisy with mutterings. Simra sat, mouth dry, heart thick and thunderous. Steel-Eye stared down at Antolios, a head or more taller than the spare slight Nibenese. But Antolios held his one-eyed gaze, curt and still as a diagram while the big Nord seethed stormy with life.  
  
“We’re encamped at present,” Antolios began softly, but still loud enough that all could hear. “That means I’ve got no contractual right to order you to do anything. I can only ask you nicely. Or, I can ask Ra’baali..?”  
  
“Steel-Eye,” Ra’baali said, grave as if she were passing a sentence. “As quartermaster, Ra’baali orders you to go with the scouts.”  
  
“There,” said Antolios with a widening white-toothed smile. “Now sit down and do as you’re told. Any further refusal and you’ll be in breach of contra—”  
  
Steel-Eye threw the first punch. They swept on in a flurry. He raked and swiped in great heaving blows, like a reaper making hay. He drove forward, striking for the smaller man’s head, neck, shoulders. His roar echoed into the crowd, on their feet suddenly, urging and howling, not for either fighter but for the fight itself.  
  
But Antolios was quick. Worse, he was calm, well-practised in a way that looked like foresight. He weathered one blow, two perhaps, forearms raised and blocking. Then he was pushing in and under, arms hooked beneath Steel-Eye’s and clasped round his back.  
  
The Nord bayed and snarled, brought down his elbows against Antolios’ shoulders, once, twice. The sick thud of sharp bone denting dull meat. Steel-Eye vied, writhed. For a moment they twisted and stood tense. Then Antolios slackened under one more hammerdown blow.  
  
Steel-Eye cried out, wild-eyed, triumphant. He stopped struggling, gathering himself for a final strike. But Antolios did something fast and clever, a foot round Steel-Eye’s ankle. He pushed something, pulled something else. The Nord toppled and fell onto his back, breath slammed from him in a sudden rasp, harsh as a sword from its sheathe.  
  
Antolios was straddling his chest. A clear resounding clap as he brought an open hand down against the Nord’s ear. A deeper more tender thud as he slammed a closed fist into the side of Steel-Eye’s neck. And then he had a knife in his other hand. And then it was against Steel-Eye’s throat. The crowd was silent again, frozen standing and raving. Both men lay still, panting.  
  
“You’re discharged,” Antolios spat, down at Steel-Eye but heard by all. “Struck off from your contract. Released from all further duties. I don’t give a single solitary shit where you go. But I swear with all the gods as my witness. If I see you in bowshot of this banner again, it’ll be swords next time. I’ll open you up and spill you for the birds and the foxes. Am I understood?”  
  
 _I wonder now if he’d planned it that way. The whole Vahn surged into a howling clamour, more amazed than approving or dismayed. But I think in that moment Antolios could have asked anything of us, and one way or another, we couldn’t have said no. Not a one among us._  
  
 _Was Steel-Eye a sacrifice he was willing to make, played as a gambit to earn him that moment? Perhaps. But when Antolios named more names no-one could deny him. Only Kjeld came close._  
  
 _“Sir,” he said. The first time I’d heard anyone call Antolios that. “Frola…This kind of task, it’s no business for a child to get involved in. I can’t bring little Shora on something like this.”_  
  
 _“You’re right,” said Antolios. “You can’t.”_  
  
 _Realisation dawned frightful in Kjeld’s eyes. I saw defiance maybe, but only sparks and seconds of it. Then dejection, admission. He looked over to Shora. She’d gone still and rigid as a cornered rabbit, eyes wide and staring at her father._  
  
 _“They’ll need a tracker,” Antolios said gently. “You’re one of the best we’ve got.” He leaned close to Kjeld then, and said something no-one else heard. Kjeld nodded and went to Shora and spoke to her._  
  
 _Next Antolios called me. I had nothing to say in return. I only nodded, amidst murmurs from those around me. Were they pleased to be rid of me? Wondering why I’d been chosen at all? I worried all these were the case and worse. With my eyes I searched out Siska or Vesh, or even Chioma, wanting to see at least one friendly face. I found none of the first two, and Chioma was busy with breakfast._  
  
 _Steel-Eye had since skulked off. But Antolios pointed the way he’d gone and said, “Thanks to him, we’re still one short. I’m going to ask for a volunteer. One more.”_  
  
 _There was barely a moment’s quiet before a reply came from the crowd’s rear curve._  
  
 _“I’ll go,” said Moridene, rubbing sleep-sand from her reddish eyes._

 

 


	29. Chapter 29

 

 

“You roaring span, you roar so loud  
and your tides are wondrous strong.  
Pray make me a wreck as I come back  
but spare me as I'm go—…”  
  
The song split into a coarsegrained yelp, more animal than human. Simra flinched. Head cowed into his shoulders, he spun to face the noise.  
  
Moridene knelt in the dry faded grass. She was working a broad-bladed dagger into the ground beneath a tight-closed fist of leaves. Grinning broad to herself, she pulled the plant up wholesale, bunched leaves and thick dirt-crumbed root.   
  
The muscles Simra had knotted taut stretched slack again. He only stood, frowning and watching, hands worrying at the strap of his gathersack to lift a little of its weight off his shoulder. He angled his head at her, raised an eyebrow.  
  
“It’s not flowering yet,” he said. A slim line of condescension slipped into his voice, no matter how he tried to keep it at bay.  
  
“Thank my stars for that!” she grinned, brandishing the pulled weed like a trophy. “And there I was worrying we were already too far into the year.”  
  
Simra’s frown etched deeper lines into his brow. “Ravelbyne,” he explained slowly. “Only the petals’ll do you any good. I don’t see any on that sorry lot you just uprooted.”  
  
Moridene returned his frown after that. She fixed him with a look, hip cocked and staring. Simra couldn’t tell which was foremost in that stare: pity or disgust. Like he’d just reached a new height of stupidity in her eyes. Within moments he was looking at her the same way.  
  
“Sometimes I forget how much of a city-boy you are,” she snorted. “But every time, regular as anything, you fix up reminding me. ‘Bright flowers, bitter roots.’ That’s the way with blue chicory, not that I’d expect you to know anyhow.”  
  
“Fuck the roots,” scowled Simra. Most of the words Moridene ever said to him were baited hooks. She rarely cast one without him getting caught. “Fuck’re you gonna do with them — smoke them? No petals means no poultices!”  
  
“Poultices? You’re talking less sense by the second. These leaves are good eating, sure, but the roots are what you want in the long of things. You’ll see.”  
  
Someone whistled, long harsh and echoing a short ways across the plain. “If you two are done courting, we’ve got three, maybe four more leagues to cover before darkfall.” Singsong, Mere called back to them.  
  
Moridene and Simra snapped still. Hands on hips and smirking one moment, Moridene cast her face down the next, and intent on scuffing dirt from the pulled root. Her stance had turned inward, like something wilting. Simra hitched up his bagstrap and turned away, pacing quick to make up the lost ground between him and the others. His face cherried red, prickling and hot.

...  
  
 _There are six of us now, split down the centerline. Three hired blades from the Vahn, and three sworn scouts from the fyrd. Us and them. We all try to ignore the line, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there._  
  
 _Of the three scouts, Mere crosses it most often. He has the most to do with us, talks the most, as if that’s the same as having the most to say. Mere is not his proper name, just what people call him. Short for a Nord, it’s a joke at his expense: a curtal little pun on Yaromir, his given name. But Mere likes nothing more than jokes, and he’s made this one his own._  
  
 _Even I stand a handsbreadth above him. Ruddy-faced and round-cheeked, round-bodied with puppy-fat, white-blonde of hair and smoothly beardless, Mere seems younger than he is. An overgrown child-thing, man-shaped by mistake. The muscled hunch and lopsided bulk of his upper body – the halmarks of a lifetime as a longbowman – look twice as grotesque for the contrast. And the way his bow dwarfs him is nearly another bad joke waiting to be made._  
  
 _Rosk is brusk, crude, short-spoken. Tactless and harsh as a boar-bristle brush, he’s guarded, foul-tempered. Like all the world belongs to him and every scrap of it disappoints him. But I find him easier to deal with than Mere. Rosk at least’s content to stay a stranger. He grunts orders, rather than trying for conversation, pushing familiar till keeping distant becomes more effort than giving in._  
  
 _And with Rosk there are no surprises. Hair the colour of wet sand and just as coarse, worn in badly kept braids, with a beard like an angry cat’s tail. Milky skinned with ice-blue eyes. Tall and grim-set, strong-built, a shield slung over his back and a sword hung long from his waist. He’s just another Nord, more full of himself than he’s ever won cause to be. And I know how to deal with that from long practice._  
  
 _Finally, Ieva keeps to herself, as cold and far-off with her fellow fyrdmen as she is with us._  
  
 _And I envy her that. I know crowds. How to move in them, go unseen in them, and scratch out a kind of solitude even surrounded by others. With the Vahn that served me well. But now we’re fewer in number, and for all the unease of the line that divides us, we’re tighter knit than I’d like sometimes. I get tired without time to be alone. And these last few days I’ve had little to none. No time to find myself again amidst the eyes and minds of others, all reckoning me to be what they think of me. No space to do any reckoning of my own._

...  
  
Ieva shuddered where she sat. Her hooded eyes rolled from pinkshot white to nearblack brown. Thin body wrapped in a thick coat of mismatched furs – russet foxskin, granite-grey wolfpelt, something beaver-brown – she looked like something from a folktale. A marlcoated bear with a hood-eyed human face nestled in the rolls and folds of its fur.  
  
Sat or squatting round an unlit campfire, the rest were watching her, expectant. Glazed and distant at first, coming out of herself, Ieva looked skittish from one traveller to the next. Moridene, Rosk, Mere, Kjeld, Simra. At first there was something birdish-quick to her motions, nervous as only a flying thing can be when it comes off the wing and takes wary to its feet. But it melted away. Her look lingered on Simra. After a moment his skin began to crawl with it. Then she set to staring at no-one at all, and it felt like a mercy.  
  
“Well?” Rosk said, when the silence stretched too far.  
  
Ieva’s lips twisted and her jaw twitched, like she was testing them, remembering how to use them. “Wolves,” she finally said. “Two packs of six or more. Another one, bigger. They’re circling round, heading the way we are. Following.”  
  
“Hear that, everyone!” Mere scoffed. “There’s wolves in the wilds! Who would’ve thought! I’d swear, Ieva, what you do gets more useful every day that goes by…”  
  
“Come sundown we’d hear as much,” said Rosk. “Don’t need your bird to tell us.”  
  
“You said they’re heading the same way we are,” Kjeld cut in, gentler than the other two Nords. “Rather than heading for us, or circling round us. So what’re they following?”  
  
Ieva smiled at him, disquietingly wide, lips disappearing as they stretched across her white teeth. “Same thing we are,” she said. “They know what they’re after. The leavings, the stragglers…But unlike us, they’ve got the scent now. A clear trail. ”  
  
“So,” said Simra. “We follow the wolves…”  
  
“And they find us a warband,” said Moridene, cracking a grin.  
  
Ieva gave a small nod, then huddled tired into her patchy fur coat, head bowed and chin tucked like a sleeping pigeon. Like other birds too perhaps, but pigeons were the only ones Simra knew well enough to say with certainty.  
  
Rosk was grim and silent after. No words to give, only harsh glances now and then, as if checking to see who might be laughing at him. Even Mere was close to quiet.  
  
The sun set behind a tangle of dense thicketed forest. As soon as it began, the trees cast shadows long and dark across the plain, reaching towards where the six had made their camp. Simra glanced from the steepling of firewood between them, up to Kjeld with a question on his face, then back again.  
  
“The wood’s dry enough, wind’s strong enough,” said Kjeld. “Which means we’re safe to light up. Or safe enough…”  
  
Simra cupped his palms and worked a gentle heat between them, whispering sparks onto the tinder. Soon the dry wood took, and began its work for the night. Generous with light and warmth, three strong-haunched hares skewered and angle-pitched over its flames, scorching golden-brown and black-laced as they cooked through.  
  
Once it burnt down to embers, it took Simra’s soot-covered teakettle, and Moridene’s iron skillet. She fried the leaves of the plants she’d picked in what little grease the skewered meat would give up, and a shred of Simra’s salted fatback when that proved not to be enough. He was too hungry to begrudge her that. Meanwhile, he brewed tea.  
  
The six of them shared out the hares, limb by limb, and ate in a travel-weary travel-hungry silence. Joints of meat, hot and splintered through with small bones. The leaves, succulent inside and flavoured golden with fat. With garlic, Simra reckoned, they could have been very good. Meat and greens were accompanied by small cakes of dark bread, hard as boiled leather. Simra dipped his in a cup of smoky tea, and found it helped a little.  
  
With a knife too big for the job, Moridene sliced the roots she’d pulled earlier, and roasted them charcoal-black. No explanation came, as she scooped out the black slivers into a leatherlined pouch. Only a self-contented look on her face, a pleased twist to her lips. Simra knew better than to ask.  
  
Instead he turned to Kjeld, and tried to swallow his pride. Ask a stupid question, he’d look stupid for a moment. Fail to ask, he’d stay stupid till it was too late.  
  
“Hunting a warband,” Simra began uneasy. “A Riftfolk warband. That’s the rest of the Vahn’s job, isn’t it? So why are we doing it? Shouldn’t we just sneak by? Wouldn’t that be quicker?”  
  
Kjeld might have laughed once, clapped Simra on the back, made him flinch. Now he answered flat and expressionless: “Horses. We’ll travel quicker, leave only tracks that look like their own. We need horses, and as far as getting them..? We’ve got no other options.”  
  
“Splendid,” sighed Simra. “Fucking wonderful…”  
  
They split the night into three watches after that. Kjeld, Rosk, Mere that night. Moridene, Simra, Ieva the next. But Simra might as well have taken his turn sooner than later for how little he slept. The night was full of birdcalls, wolfsong, a quick wind moaning in the higher reaches of the world. And even when he drifted off, he dreamt too much to rest properly.  
  
Digging. The mattock breaking ground for graves. A hundred dead and a hundred more, crowding the battlefield. Standing now, they line up to fill the pit. “Hurry,” they tell him. “Nothing so lazy as the living,” they tell him, through faces ruined by axes, and lips clot-sealed with blood. When the pit is deep enough, they push, and Simra is the first in.  
  
Searching. Something has been lost. A precious thing, under the mirror-dark face of the freezing water. Simra plunges down an arm, two arms, searching with fingers already too numb to feel their way. It’s lost. Gone. Panic spreads from the mind down. Numb spreads up his arms.  
  
Touching. A tangle of legs. Knots tied in soft thick hair. Trying to count freckles, but losing count, over and over. Knowing he’ll never number them. The truth sticking like a fishbone in the back of his throat. He can’t breathe. A blush so hot it burns him.

...  
  
 _We sit and wait. Kjeld and Mere argued through their watch. Between dreams I heard them. Another place to lay the blame for why I slept so badly._  
  
 _Mere was a woodsman once. A keeper of game or grounds or private forests for some Eastmarch carl or other, before his master answered the call of the fyrd. Between them, he and Kjeld know enough wood- and wild-lore to figure it’s something worth fighting over. And they still haven’t stopped._  
  
 _I fry bread in fatback grease for us. Brew tea. Wait and write. And they veer back and forth, fretting over whether to pass round the forest ahead or through it. They’ve doubled back and worried it at so long I don’t think either knows who was originally arguing which point. Like two dogs fighting over a bone till the toothmarks left behind belong to both and neither of them._  
  
 _Ieva has slipped into herself again, riding the wind with her senses, and seeing through the eyes of her bird. It’s an interesting kind of magic, and useful too no doubt. But she’s strange with it. Like she loses track of what body she’s in from time to time._  
  
 _After Antolios, it’s hard not to notice that we have no leader. The closest thing we have is a crow, a direction, a distance to cover. And that’s no way to keep order, keep to purpose._

 

 


	30. Chapter 30

 

 

_The woods are solemn, muffled with shadows. Save for the saltflats, Eastmarch is vaguely wooded, grown with trees almost all over. Pines and willows, oaks and ash, I think. But the Rift is different. In all things I’ve come to expect that. And as far as my knowing goes, the trees here have no names. Upright and spindly, severe, standing straight as spearshafts with silverleaf papery bark. Then they thatch out, meshing the forest’s foliage into a deep dense ceiling. Under it, sound doesn’t travel far. Day turns to twilight, and night is pitch-black._   
  
_We travelled through the pewter coloured morning, till the afternoon took over, argent. Evening was a flicker of gold – a broad gleaming horizontal, breaking through the trees – then gone. Owl-calls echoed nearby. We were spared the cries of wolves and shrieks of rutting foxes, but knowing they were still there and only silent made their absence a fearful thing. Night watch was a tense hang of time, dark hours crawling by till dawn._   
  
_What the cause might be I can’t be sure, but Ieva has grown stranger since we came into the woods. More reclusive, more skittish, quicker to alarm. And sometimes I look at her, and if she’s with us at all – not sleepwalking like she does when her senses are elsewhere – I see the start of panic in the way she looks and moves. Perhaps it’s the closeness of this place. Or how cut off we are from the sky here._   
  
_One brief exception. She came to from one of her trances, eyes rolling, and told us all to wait. Scampering off a ways into the trees, she stopped at the foot of one, and shucked off her big fur coat. Beneath it she’s thinner than some of the beggars I’ve seen in the gulley-floor of the Grey Quarter, and dressed in high felt and leather boots, a faded and torn wrap-around coat of wool that might once have been blue, sashed tightly tiny round her middle. But weak as she looks, she shinned up the tree, and came back afterward, grinning like a fool, with a bird’s nest cradled in her hands._   
  
_“Rock warblers,” she said, baring a mouthful of small off-white teeth._   
  
_“How’re six of us meant to share two little eggs for dinner?” said Rosk._   
  
_“No,” she shook her head. “The nest. In Spring they lay their eggs. Make the nest from spicebarks, tender green shoots and sprigs. Things they’ll feed to their chicks, time comes for them to hatch. Like flies laying their eggs in meat.”_   
  
_She smiled at the comparison, like it was poetry, beautiful as anything else in nature. (Or as beautiful as some people reckon nearly all of nature to be…) But when she boiled the nest that night, it broke apart into a thick soup, smelling pungent and wholesome as any good bone-broth, and subtly spiced with the sprucey tangs of the spicebarks she mentioned. With dumplings of barley, bound together by the beaten eggs, then rolled and cooked in the soup, the meal was a good one._

  
  
Morning came. Brittle light streamed through the trees, giving shape and substance to things that had only been shadows the night before. Stones jutted like tusks from the gum-soft forest floor. Carved with senseless runes, they looked placed, not part of the landscape by nature alone. Built rather than belonging, but too ancient for history, they lunged up out of myth.  
  
One loomed over their scanty six-man camp. Over the runes, sky-blue figures of paint daubed it. Flaked and scratched mostly, but some still showed clear. A thing with knotty-branching antlers. Two wolves, each chasing the other’s tail. Moss and weeds grew thick at the stone’s root. Simra remembered the tumbledown arches and standing stones of the Eastmarch saltflats. This stone, and the others spaced irregular through the forest, were the same kind of mystery.  
  
Eyes still banked with sleep-sand, Simra crawled from his bedroll. The air was close and muggy — an illusory kind of warm. Overhead the forest ceiling dripped heavy and occasional. Some time in the night, rain had fallen, but took till morning to filter though the deep canopy. A drop broke across Simra’s nose. He blinked in shock, swore, then struggled out of the warmer clothes he’d slept in. Strapping on his boots, stripped to his deep-collared tunic and mongrel scarf, he stood and peered between the trees.  
  
Moridene was up already, the others still sleeping. Another surprise. She crouched over the ashes of last night’s fire, piled with new twigs and kindling. Moment by moment, she mashed flint and tinder together. Every try brought a wet and useless spittle of sparks. The wood was too damp to catch.  
  
“I could sort that for you,” Simra said, ambling over to her. It was too early to make the words sharp or clever. They came frank and flat.  
  
She squinted up at him sidelong. Dark swathes showed beneath her eyes. Her face was slack, downcast to be up with the dawn. “I know you mean with magic,” she grunted. “Ain’t even gotta ask to know it.” Another strike, and a stutter of sparks. “Way I see it, I been lighting my own fires just fine fore you came along. Imagine I’ll keep on lighting ‘em just fine without.”  
  
The next sparks were the feeblest yet. Simra gave just one note of a small joyless laugh, then fell silent.  
  
“Cornmush! Damn me eightways and every-which-way but I am past caring!” She flung down her kindling tools and looked away from the fire. Shoulders set into a hunch, Moridene stared pointedly through the trees, not looking at Simra.  
  
He scuffed a patch of forest floor with the sole of his boot, drying it as best he could, then sat down by her, cross-legged and facing the unlit fire. Cupping his hands, like a smoker lighting their pipe, he breathed, then sighed a small calling-word into his palms. Smoke trailed up from between his fingers. Warmth blossomed against his skin. He urged it from his hands and onto the kindling, a billowing swarm of red-gold sparks. Soon the wood caught and began to burn.  
  
Moridene looked back only when the flames were high and dancing. She watched them, sullen and quiet. This was the first time he’d seen her with so little fire of her own.  
  
“My mam told me a story once,” Simra said. “How one long Winter in the Grazelands, the sun set one day and wouldn’t rise. No-one could make fire, to warm themselves or cook by. That was gone too. And there was a girl who set out to change this. She left her clan freezing and starving, said she’d come back with something to save them, or she wouldn’t come back at all. So she saddled her guar, rode westward, to find where Azura puts the sun while it sleeps. Sometimes when my mam told it, Azura asked the girl three riddles. One for day, and night, and the twilight between them. Sometimes she just liked the girl’s spark. So Azura gave the girl three names she’d heard the sun speak in its sleep, and told her fire would come when she called them…”  
  
“That’s so much buzzard spit,” Moridene grunted.  
  
“Course it is,” said Simra, not sounding certain. “Maybe. But the story finishes with how she gets back home, teaches the names to her clan. They call all the names at once. Burn down their whole camp to keep warm. Only the girl survives, knowing the names well enough to ask them to spare her. But the journey and her grief has made her old now. She travels to the next clan she finds on the plains, then the next, and teaches them all only one of the names each, so that by the time they put the three together, they’ll have all learnt to be careful with how to use the one entrusted them, right?”  
  
“…Right…”  
  
“It’s a metaphor. No real history in it. Probably. It’s a parable, or whatever. About how fire’s the gift that lets us use a bit of nature to raise ourselves above it. And how it’ll come back to bite you if you’re stupid about how you use it. Same for magic, a sword, anything like that. The trick’s knowing that using it’d come easy, but knowing when it ought to and when it oughtn’t…”  
  
Moridene gave a small humming noise. It sounded behind her closed lips. “Sounds to me like a reason why starting a fire ought to take a good long while. Gives you time to think whether you really need one or not…”  
  
Simra kissed his teeth. “Or time enough to freeze and starve. Least when you need it easy, it’s there…” So many words so early in the morning, it was like he had none left.  
  
“I wanna borrow your teapot,” Moridene said, changing the subject, fixing him with a look that was almost shy. “Can I?”  
  
“…What for?”  
  
“Tea,” she sneered. “Kinda. I’ll show you if you lend it here.”  
  
Simra sighed and fetched the pot. Moridene filled it with water, crumbled some of her roasted roots between her fingers, and pinched them in to brew. She poured it out after a time, into two tin cups that Simra had seen clanking among her packs as they walked. The ‘tea’ was ink-black, veiled with steam. She wolfed hers down, huffing and sighing between each scalding mouthful. Simra waited for his to cool.  
  
“Home,” she grinned, leering-wide. “That’s what it tastes of.”  
  
Simra sipped. To him it tasted black, burnt, skirting between bitter and rich in a way that left him uncertain. A hint perhaps of fennel. He tried not to grimace. It might benefit from milk.  
  
“Where is home?” he asked. “For you, I mean.”  
  
“The Jeralls. Bit of everywhere else too. Reckon I’ve been all over, but the mountains are what comes up first when I think of home.”  
  
“Met a Colovian sailor once,” Simra said, slow and careful. “You don’t look much like him…”  
  
“Pshaw! Maybe ‘cos I ain’t like him, or any other fuckin’ Low Colovian. Just like the Jeralls ain’t the Highlands?”  
  
She twisted her lip, raised an eyebrow. Simra’s eyes settled near her mouth. She had a scar there, a little like his. A crescent indented from lip to jaw…  
  
“Point taken,” he said, looking down, taking another drink.  
  
“My da was like you. In two ways, actually, seeing as he wasn’t from Morrowind neither, but he was a Dunmer all the same. But ma’s people were from the mountains. That’s what you wanna ask, ain’t it? ‘What’ I am?”  
  
She barked a half-hollow humourless laugh. A glimmer of pride hid in the sound, but ended before it could shine.  
  
Simra wanted to say something. How he’d known others like her, in the Quarter, with more born every year. The Barsatim brothers, with their small round eyes. Junata, whose irises were blue-grey as a cloudy sky, ears short and only bluntly pointed like Moridene’s. He didn’t think less of her for it…  
  
“Don’t reckon it’s very different from a Dunmer who’s never seen Morrowind,” he said softly. “A Zainab that’s never seen so much as a guar, let alone the Grazelands…”  
  
“Maybe so,” she said. “But folk can’t tell that just by lookin’ at you, can they?”  
  
Meanwhile, the others were stirring. As Moridene cleaned out the teapot, and Simra bundled his things, together, they all began to break camp.

 


	31. Chapter 31

“I knew. Not in ways I knew how to say. Not in words. But I knew…Maybe like you knew to follow.”  
  
The moon was all they had to see by. It washed the world in silver, and shadows of ocean-floor ocean-dark blue. It showed Ieva’s face, and drenched the rest of her in gloom. Vague with shadow, the bones of her skull seemed to shift as she spoke and smiled a small clever smile.  
  
By night the world contracts. The end of the distance was a near thing, well within the draw of an arrow, and still on the edges of earshot. Simra, Rosk, Moridene, Kjeld, Mere, and Ieva stood, crouched, and sat in the shrubs and weeds of the thinning forest’s edge. They looked out to where the plain began again, flat as a black becalmed sea. Lights burnt there. Campfires built big by people who didn’t care if they went unseen, and low broad-pitched tents standing stark and murky against the firelight.  
  
“I swear,” muttered Rosk, “on the barrows of my forefathers, if you don’t have a plan…”  
  
“No plan,” said Ieva. “I brought us where we needed to be. Here, we can get what we need. My craft doesn’t—”  
  
“—tell us what we need to do so we can get it,” Moridene interrupted. “There’s magic for you. Takin’ as it gives.”  
  
“And we don’t even know how many there are,” said Mere. “If only you’d birdlimed your brain to an owl, Ieva…”  
  
“Then we would be blind by day instead.” Ieva had tilted her head, angling her face into the black fall of her hair. Guarded, half-hiding, she looked at the world with only one eye now. “Which would you prefer..?”  
  
Simra closed his fist round the grip of his sword. He felt the rough-wearing fabric, and thought of the blue he knew it to be, trying to fill his mind with just one thing, and leave no room for panic. But he had doubts, fears, a feeling they were walking into the jaws of a thing so stupid it would kill them all. Like the night, swallowing them, then nothing. And that feeling was bigger than the blue.  
  
“It shouldn’t matter,” Kjeld said softly.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I said, it shouldn’t matter how many or how few there are. All I know’s that there’s at least three fires out there. And while they might just be tricky enough to light more fires than they need – make it seem they’re more in numbers than they are, and I’ve known Riftfolk to do just that – I don’t suppose they’d pitch more tents. A warband’s like to have at least one horse for each fighter, and spares for their baggage.”  
  
A silence, expectant now. Simra couldn’t see Kjeld, but he latched onto his voice, hoping thin through the moon’s drab halflight.  
  
“That’s all the mind we need pay to their numbers,” Kjeld continued. “That they’ve at least six horses for us, and tethered or hobbled for the night, most like. The rest’s not here nor there, as we won’t be fighting them. Will we?”  
  
Rosk began to say something. Mostly a wordless growl.  
  
“Will we?” Kjeld repeated, firmer now. “Not if we’ve a distraction. And there’s some decoys that’ll work better by night.”  
  
The moon moved in the sky, sliding through its height and starting to sink. To Simra the world seemed to have been dark and strange for days now.  
  
First the gloom of the forest. Its thick canopy, and rare shafts of sunlight lancing so bright through the shade that they looked solid, like columns holding up the hidden sky. Questions lying unanswered amongst the trees — ancient and ageless standing stones, and domes of dry-bricked rock like hollow-hearted cairns or little houses for people long-past.  
  
And now this. Simra and Kjeld split from the others, all of them parting according to plan. The two of them ducked and ran on bent legs, skirting round the warband’s camp, near-blind. An otherworld of shade, cloud, gasps of fitful moon-brightness, then nothing but the whish-whish of the plain’s tall grass.  
  
“It’s damp,” whispered Kjeld. “Shit and stormwinds. The grass is good as soaked.”  
  
Two days through the forest had spared them the worst of the rain. But they’d heard it overhead, felt the drops that managed to worm through the leaf-cover. Beyond the woods, the earth was mud-slick, the grass wet and heavy.  
  
“You said we wouldn’t need to fight,” said Simra. “Right?”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“So I don’t need to let up for that, do I? No need to save anything for a fight we’re not gonna be fighting.”  
  
“…You can still do it then?” asked Kjeld.  
  
“Reckon so.”  
  
“Now?”  
  
“Now. We’re the signal, right? No-one else’s mark to wait on...”  
  
Simra tried not to let his voice shudder. In the dark perhaps it was easier. Some part of him had been yearning for light since the sun set, knowing all he had to do was dredge it up from within himself. Not just warmth and light, but the sense that came with them. Simra breathed, noting the rhythm in his chest and how it transferred into the world around him. It began as feeling, returning to his fingers as he brushed them through the grass. Then the air broke into sparks. Some darting eager, others drifting aimless as fireflies, they multiplied as he spoke the words to call and control them.  
  
“Do I want to stand back?” said Kjeld.  
  
Simra managed a hum in response. His thoughts, bones, sinews were taken up with holding the spell taut. Kjeld’s footsteps took him a short distance away. And Simra could feel the magic, welling up in his belly. He let it go.  
  
A pulse of harsh light glared hot, seared out from him in a brief tight wave. The same wrench as always came when he overreached himself — something tearing free of him, tearing chunks of meat from the inside of him. Something will always be eaten.  
  
A gushing scalding cloud of steam. The night went from chill to sweat-prickling hot around Simra. He snarled another call and the air hazed, sparks rushed. Something in the ground ruptured, burst, and dirt flew as the grass began to blaze. The flames were born hungry, and began to spread.  
  
“Come on!” Kjeld urged.  
  
Simra followed his voice, running through the dark. They skirted further round, flanking the camp. Simra stumbled as he tried to trot, sight worse now than before. His vision swam with bruises of colour the flames had left behind. He fell clumsy, weak as if half-starved. A grip closed round his upper arm, hoisted him. Kjeld’s hand held fast round his and led him on.  
  
Voices echoed in the dark now. Together, Simra and Kjeld went to ground, crouching hidden and still. Figures moved between the three campfires, closer now than ever — close enough almost to make out words. A hurried dash away, the grassfire Simra had started was growing. From below it lit a billowing curtain of smoke and steam and rising sparks, throwing waves of red up skyward.  
  
“Here’s where they do one of two things,” Kjeld whispered, so close to Simra’s ear he flinched from the touch of his breath. “Either they up camp to get away from the flames, or they try to stop the spread. Chaos either way. Now, see? They’re edging closer.”  
  
Five man-shapes were rushing towards the fire, silhouetted against its glow, shouting each to each. A few others still darted between the fires and tents of their camp.  
  
“Up now,” said Kjeld. “With me.”  
  
“There’s some left,” Simra hissed. “Fuck knows how many! You said there wouldn’t be a fight!”  
  
But by then Kjeld was on his feet, an axe in one hand, long knife in the other. “Not a fair fight at any rate!” he called back over his shoulder.  
  
Kjeld broke into a run. Simra followed as best he could, drawing his sword, trying not to think about stumbling again, falling onto it. “Stupid stupid stupid,” he mumbled to himself, breath short and rhythmic with the pace they struck through the grass. They took a slingshot path, swerving round the camp before they moved in.  
  
The tents were bigger up close. Spars of sun-bleached wind-dried wood, woven round and beneath stretched hide, patterned fabric, bending rib-like inward to each tent’s peak. The voices too were loud enough now for Simra to note their dialect: familiar but warped in places, with throat-choking stops and hardstruck ‘k’s and ‘t’s, unknown words. Horses brayed and cried out through the camp’s smell of smoke and roasted meat. Nearer to its campfire light, Kjeld and Simra bent low, angling towards the horse-noise.  
  
Simra saw them as a huddle of uneasy shapes, twitching and worrying, motion and mood shared sympathetic through them. He looked for Kjeld’s shadow as they crept towards the tethered herd. Hooves pawed the ground, tramping and fretting at it. Simra didn’t hear the footsteps and saw the torchlight too late.  
  
“Simra!”  
  
A hurtling sound and a whirling thresh of air. A dark shape sped past Simra’s face. He followed it with his eyes, bolting up from his crawling crouch, and wheeling about to see. A hard grunt and a blunt thud. Kjeld’s axe struck a human shape, the blunt of its handle knocking into their face. One moment the sentry held a torch overhead. The next they’d dropped it to the ground.  
  
Simra sprung into the shallow pool of light it cast. Sword-first, he connected with the dazed sentry. They were unbalanced for an eyeblink by the axe-blow, and Simra was beyond thought. He felt the sword sink a few wet inches into the man’s belly. Pulled back, stabbed again. Not like a sword, not like a battlefield — like backalleys in the underbelly, a shiv, Ostwulf’s words. Three thrusts. Four maybe. The sudden hot reek of life pouring out into the cold air. Clammy wet, already drying on Simra’s hands.  
  
He wrenched the sword free a final time. It was harder than he’d expected. A grating and sucking effort. The night was full of hoofbeats now, starting to gallop and thunder, ponies shrieking for the sentry who’d died in silence. Simra and the dead man each fell back and away from each other, hard onto the ground. Simra scrambled up. The other man didn’t rise.  
  
Simra’s head was throbbing too. The wild writhed and blurred. His senses were full of reeking metal-smell, the searing effort of looking and searching and fearing as his heart and thoughts raced. He slammed the sword back into its scabbard. It was all he could think to do.  
  
Then there was movement. The blur overtook him. He’d lost time. Voices in the distance and voices nearer by. An unfamiliar motion beneath him, and something gripped between his thighs. Salt warmth on his face. Drumming hooves and arms around him. No. Not around him. Just either side of him, knotted in the mane of the horse he shared with someone, seated behind him, body flush against his back.  
  
He’d been scared. He realised that now. And the fear hadn’t yet gone.  
  
Five voices yipped and yelled to each other as six ponies coursed across the plain. No light to go by, they called out, keeping close and keeping their course by sound.  
  
Already Simra felt bruised, leg to hip, groin and arse and all between. The motion was smoother than he’d thought. Smoother still when they slowed to a quick amble. Even so, his stomach churned.  
  
“No,” he moaned low, on and on, flat like a dirge. “No no no no Toli you pig-fucking shit-for-brains piece of what the fuck ever made you think this’d be a good idea oh shit fucking no…”  
  
“Shut it,” snapped Moridene from behind him. “Shut the fuck up why don’t you? Some of us gotta concentrate on riding bareback with rope for a fuckin’ bridle without we got you whinin’ bout how hard it is bein’ a gods-damned passenger!”  
  
And after that, Simra was quieter, though his thoughts carried on the same. No room or time for triumph.


	32. Chapter 32

 

 

The sun looked lazy down, warm and direct from where it hung in midsky. A kind wind cooled the plains, but the grass was chapped and thin for leagues and leagues around, too low to be combed up into waves.

It was a bad place to stop. Too open, too broad, nowhere to hide. But even Simra knew the horses needed rest. The noises they made had grown desperate, pained, and their shaggy half-winter coats were lathered with sweat. Roped round the ankles, they stood hobbled and haggard but wary, eyeing their new riders.

“So much for a quick in and out,” said Mere. “We go in to steal six horses, but our Moridene turns it into a three days’ pillage.”

“Breakfast,” said Moridene. “I got us breakfast. If you don’t wanna eat, I ain’t forcin’ you.”

A coil of half-cured sausage squealed and blackened in her skillet. The oil it bled was deep crimson, and so was the scent it gave out, darkened by the lean gamey meat. She poked at it with a knife, not looking up. A small flat wheel of hard ewe’s cheese sat nearby.

“Breakfast,” repeated Mere, mocking. “At noon…So what’s that? Lunch? Suppose we’re eating that at darkfall, hey?”

He pointed a string-calloused finger at a battered wooden box, close to Moridene’s side. Simple, no ornaments except the holes augured onto its upmost face, it looked a little like the sounding-bowl of a lute. But the neck had snapped off, and the strings sprayed out freely, tied and pegged to nothing and twitching whiskerish in the breeze.

“I take it back,” Moridene growled. “One more word and I swear I will cram this down your damn throat.”

“And Simra!” Mere groaned, changing tack. “Trust a greyling’s temper to turn something like this into a bloodbath…”

“The lad did only what any of us would have,” said Kjeld. “Time came when a killing was needed, and he killed. Or would you’ve preferred that sentry lived to sound an alarm?”

“Nine times,” Mere hissed. “Little savage stabbed him nine times.”

“Four times,” said Simra. His voice was hollow and bone-stark. “I only stuck him four times.”

All blur and shadow as it happened, the memory was clearer than the moment itself had been. Simra sat now, cross-legged and aching by the small cookfire. Everything below his collarbones felt bruised black and beaten tender by the night and morning’s bareback ride. Sitting gave his legs leave to rest, but still pained him in its own way.

“Four is enough,” said Ieva quiet, dry and oracular. “Oaths will be sworn. Some that would not follow us for horses will follow us for the blood we shed.”

“Riftmen…” Kjeld said in a ragged sigh.

Simra barely tried to listen. He muttered and growled to himself, troubling over the meet of his sword’s hilt and scabbard. Wriggling and wrenching, he jerked it free where dried blood had scabbed it closed. The blade was dark and crusted with it, tarnished and lustreless. In careful motions, with a ragscrap in his hand, he worked to clean off the worst of it. No matter how he tried, a few rust-coloured freckles remained.

When he ate, the sausage was strong-flavoured: mutton or goat, or a mixture of both, with cinnamon, herbs, some kind of mild sweetish redspice, and the smoke-tang left by its curing. The cheese was crumbly, sharp, marbled through with horseradish that rose straight to his nose and made his ears ring. But he was hungry, tired, battered and haunted. And that made food the greatest comfort he had.

 

_We travel, never stopping for long. Two leagues we ride our horses at a steady trot, then one league we walk, and lead them by the reins we’ve improvised from strips of cloth or braided rope. The walking is a respite for us as well as the ponies. Bareback riding is hard on both the rider and the ridden, I’ve learnt. But it holds another respite for me. It gives me back my space._

_I rode at first with Moridene. Then Kjeld, and now Ieva._

_Moridene muttered and grumbled constant behind me. How riding flats like these is like as not to make her seasick. How back where she’s from, the little mare beneath us would be reckoned a big dog, and no kind of horse at all. And Kjeld was grimly silent, save the rare grunt or groan as he shifted against the horse’s spine._

_Ieva says nothing at all, but rides smoothest, with the greatest ease. And when our mounts whickered and complained as we tried again to ride them after breakfast, it was Ieva who calmed them, stepping close and careful on light feet, and cooing words too soft for us to hear._

_There’s one spare horse. A red-brown mare, blotched with sour-milk coloured spots, and with a wild mane that falls over her eyes. The others take turns to ride it, and give their own ponies a rest. But I just note it awkwardly, knowing it was meant for me. And I can’t tell which idea I like less, between being a burden to the others, or riding that beast alone._

_In the smooth-riding silence of going with Ieva, my memory gnaws at me. I’ve always been good at remembering, but for once I feel I’d prefer to forget. It wasn’t a fight, in the camp. Just a killing. And one moment I recall it, like watching from outside myself, and the memory’s distant and cold, laughable almost. But the next time I remember, I’m locked into my head and living it again. Blood hot on my hands and flesh making way for moving steel. I don’t know which is worse._

_And I remember the docks too, and mudlarking with Gitur. The frying reek of burning fat and crisping skin. I still remember the cries, but not the man’s face. It’s the same with the sentry I left dead. After the terror, the blood drumming in my ears, the sickness as both faded, what troubles me most is the cool hollow feeling that killing leaves behind. There might be guilt or shame or even pride at the heart of that feeling, but I can’t find them, and don’t want to search, fearful of what I might turn up instead._

_Our pace chews up league after league, and the land scrolls past us. The hard rate we’ve struck hurts, but staying still is worse. Like Ieva says, some will have tried to follow us. And we’re deep into the herding and hunting grounds of the Riftfolk tribes now. There will be other bands, other riders. And the night is full of wolves. And though our mounts can crop the grass, we go hungry._

 

“Today we saw mountains,” said Kjeld. “Or I did, or think I did, through the rainclouds. Just the highest heights of them, mark, but tomorrow they’ll be closer. And the day after that we’ll see the forests that wood round their roots. We’re getting close now.”

“And that’s when your work starts,” said Simra bluntly.

Kjeld rounded on him. “My work started before you were an itch in your da’s janglesack,” he said, the start of a scowl in his voice.

“Tracking,” Simra lurched to say. “I meant tracking. It was a joke. A fucking stupid one…”

Simra went wounded-quiet and Kjeld’s face softened. There was a flash of something in his expression, before it laxed natural. Like Kjeld had recognised something worth pitying, and it gentled him. Simra dreaded how little that briared at him.

“Aye,” Kjeld nodded. “If it were Winter, we might know better where to find them. Some valley or a crook in the woods, out from the teeth of the wind. A warlord, well, he might even have a hall to weather the cold in. But Summer? If I know Riftfolk, they’ll either be herding or raiding, and on the move either way.”

The night had gathered round them hours ago. The six of them had eaten nearly nothing, and lit no fire for want of fuel. The sky had been fickle these past few days. Bright flat blue might smear with cloud, and howl and scourge them with rain, with no hint or sign to warn of the change. Weather and hunger had wearied them, and made them uneasy in the open air.

Kjeld’s watch was drawing to a close. Simra’s was yet to begin, but he hadn’t been able to sleep. He worried about rain in the night, waking up hoary with dawntime frost, catching a chill or a fever — getting left behind. He worried about what dreams he’d dream. And he worried about what he could feel the first stirrings of, taking root behind his eyes. Perhaps he was only tired, bruised, hungry. Or perhaps it was the grey. He spoke to Kjeld, listened to him, like a drowning man clings to driftwood. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts, afraid of what he’d find.

“Why’s it you know so much about the Riftfolk?” asked Simra. Kjeld’s silence scared him.

But the silence drew on a while as Kjeld chewed the question over. “It was the last jarl I fought for,” he finally began. “Older than this one and like to jump at shadows. Like as not to take all he could as an insult, see threats where there were none. Something to prove in his old age, perhaps, but more to himself than his people—…Shh!”

Kjeld stopped abrupt and listened hard. Simra pricked up his ears. A wolf moaned low from the near-distant darkness. Moments passed. Another picked up the call, then another.

“Shit…” muttered Kjeld. “A light. And Mere,” he nearly spat the name, like it left a bad taste. “You’ll have to wake him.”

“Shit,” Simra echoed, and dredged magelight from down in his belly, and set it glimmering overhead. Another star in the night sky, dim and sullen at being moored so close to ground. Then Simra stumbled through the darkness to rouse Mere. He found the small Nord already awake.

“Wolves?” said Mere, barely a question.

“Right,” said Simra, watching as Mere pulled on his low slimsoled boots, unwrapped and strung his longbow.

“Where are they?” asked Mere. “How many?”

Simra blushed hot. Stupid stupid stupid. He could only shrug and gesture round their huddled camp.

Another call went up, circling in the darkness, baleful and yearning. Five or six voices, perhaps.

“That many,” said Simra weakly. “All round.”

Mere muttered a curse, thrusting his quiver of arrows into Simra’s hands. “Your wisplights,” he said. “Can you move them? Send them out there? How many can you make?”

Just one had left him drained and twisted, like a washrag wrung out and left to dry. The last howl had been closer. He’d fought, killed a man, killed one and a half men – by fire and now by blade – and he’d survived the Grey Quarter and survived leaving. Only to be torn apart by wolves. Stupid. By dumb animals. Stupid. Simra’s heart grew tight and painful as the panic rose.

“I’ll see,” he managed to say.

He focused on the magelight he’d already cast, and felt for the threads that tied him to it, and moored it where it hung. He worked his fingers, like fastening and loosing knots. A whimper of effort slipped past his lips. He chewed into the edge of one cheek, hoping more than concentrating. The light moved, mazing off into the black, towards the last wolfcall.

A shape loomed large there, hunkered on all fours. Simra barely noticed when Mere yanked a long heavy war-arrow from the quiver he held. He felt the breeze of its passing, heard the thrum of the string. Heard a yelp and a chorus of yowls, flushing off into the further darkness, then gone.

The light went out. One had been enough. Simra was smiling but had forgotten why.

Kjeld and Mere spoke, ushered him out across the plain, but Simra couldn’t understand the words they spoke. Dumbly, he helped them haul the clay-brown wolf towards their camp, and set it up on stakes to hang and bleed once Mere had taken back his arrow.

Kjeld put a hand on Simra’s shoulder. He was speaking to him, trying to find Simra’s eyes with his own, but Simra couldn’t meet his gaze. Kjeld repeated the words till they wormed into Simra’s mind, through the fog that had overtaken him.

“The story…I’ll tell you the story another time…”

 

 

 

 

 


	33. Kjeld's Story

_Falkreath’s woods are the thickest and deepest in Skyrim. There are places in those woods where the forest grows so thick overhead, and the trees are so enormous and old, that the ground beneath has known nothing but darkness for centuries. Dells the ancient oaks have trapped in dusk unending. There are places in those woods no mortal eye has ever known, and no foot has ever trod, and where beasts walk trackless tracks, unknown to all the world._

_But there are ways through the forests of Falkreath, and clearings where cities and towns have been hewn out from its rich timber. And in the brighter parts of the forest, game is rich and life is good. Generous with its meat and hides and horns, anyone with a bow, or a spear for throwing, or a hunting-trained dog, could feed a family in that hold, if not for the laws of the land. Anyone with enough twine or leather for rabbit-snares could feed themselves._

_Kjeld was a poacher, born to a family of poachers, who homesteaded in the shadowed reaches of the forest. Where the fork of a brook gave them fish and clear water, and the wild world between the trees gave them meat and wood, clothes and tools. They would trade sometimes with nearby hamlets, or travel to barter with further flung villages for the few things they couldn’t gather and make for themselves. But for the most part they lived in isolation, enjoying the streak of luxury they had found and carved out for themselves._

_Falkreath bowed and broke itself to fit the yoke of its jarl, Dengeir. He was old and growing older, with more to prove to the world now than he ever had in his youth. Every shadow held a dagger and every border was both a threat and a thing to be kept and guarded, fierce and jealous. All diplomacy came as an insult, and Falkreath found itself alone, friendless, and scorned on all sides. Dengeir readied himself for a war against all the world, and would have fought it, in the name of his fear and pride._

_Kjeld’s family thought their life among the trees would hide them from the troubles of the hold. It always had before._

_But one day dusk came, and Kjeld’s brother didn’t come home with it. Perhaps, they thought, he was following a trail that went to deep and held too much promise to leave behind. But he didn’t come back the next night, or the next. Two weeks passed, then a month. The family began to mourn him._

_They dug a pit and filled it with the things he’d need in Sovngaarde, and covered it with a cairn to Arkay the Barrowkeeper, so the god would know where to find these things, and bring them to their lost son and elder brother. They only wished they had his bow to send with him, and the jawbone he’d kept from his first hound, to accompany him to the otherworld. But both lay with him, wherever that might be._

_Weeks passed as they mourned and prepared. One morning, the brother they thought they’d lost, and the son for whom they’d only just begun to grieve, came back. He limped, was pale and scarred, couldn’t speak, wouldn’t remove his filthy clothes as if they were the only things holding his newly frailed body together. But for all he was a shadow of himself, they welcomed him back from the dead._

_The next day, five of the jarl’s foresters came to their homestead. Kjeld put a knife through the eye of one before the remaining four rounded him and his family up, and separated them. They were tried as squatters, poachers, getting fat off the plenty of land that belonged to the hold’s carls, and through them, the jarl himself._

_Kjeld was given a choice. Swear himself as a bondsman to the jarl’s fyrd, or go defiant to the hangman’s noose. He choose the fyrd, and never found how his family had chosen. He was young then, and afraid for his life. His brother had been caught, and tortured, and had led the foresters home. The world had broken like an egg around Kjeld, the golden yolk spilt and lost._

_It was in those days that jarl Dengeir of Falkreath reckoned the greatest threat to his antlered crown – and thus the most precious-kept jewel within it – was his eastern border, shared with the Rift. A land of valleys, gulleys, wooded highlands and snowy wind-baleful passes. Discussion of the border had turned to argument, and argument had turned to insult. Kjeld never knew who sent the first raiding party, shot the first arrow, struck the first blow, but he found himself in those borderlands, fighting a wide-frontiered war of a thousand small battles against the Riftfolk._

_For a time he fought, both as a scout and in the shieldwall, for want of choice. It was that or die as a poacher and murderer. This was his way to a pardon, and he’d always been taught that survival was the world’s greatest good._

_But with every battle the Kreathings fought against the Riftfolk, in the tight and merciless lands of their borders, Falkreath looked stronger as the Rift grew weaker. Ponies, javelins, bows and swords were no good in the mountain passes and howling valleys, and the Rift’s riders fought poorly amongst the crags and pinewoods. Those however are where a Kreathing fights best, in ambush after ambush, on foot._

_Kjeld was among the warriors that held the line at Arcwind Pass, as wave after wave of riders made their shields bristle with javelins, then crashed against them, dispersing like sea-spray, or dismounted to die on two feet rather than four. Kjeld was among the warriors who hunted the warlord Emeseg Two-Tongued, captured him, put him to the sword and gave him to the crows, mocking the Rift’s old burial traditions. Kjeld did so much in the name of his jarl, and built such a name for himself in his service, that perhaps he began to believe his loyalty was earnt and not extorted. But he had never met the jarl. More likely his loyalty was to the carl he fought for._

_Tiela Oakthorn. By twists of fate and irony he came to love her. She had hair with all the lustrous colour and shine of a horsechestnut shell, and a roaring commanding voice. Eventually she came to love him too, though both kept the affair secret._

_Meanwhile the Kreathings grew proud and plunder-hungry, wanting not just to defend their homes but make their lands and families rich. Having beaten the Riftfolk back from his borders, jarl Dengeir sought to stretch those borders into the Rift’s broad flat wide-skied heartland. It was there that the tables turned, and fate twisted its skein once more._

_On the plains, the Kreathings couldn’t hide. Their knowledge of the land they’d fought in before was left weeks of marching behind them. Here they were blinded by the open steppe around them. Here they were lost in the emptiness of grass-sea and blue-sky. Here they were marooned, miserable as a carcass while the clans and warbands and raiding-parties of the Rift circled them, and picked meat from their bones like vultures._

_Over months, the fyrd was torn to pieces. The riders of the Rift swept round and round, day and night, luring off scraps of the Kreathing army, sowing chaos, then reaping the harvest in blood. Barbed javelins and feinted charges, false retreats. Strong shieldwalls broken into weak and scattered men and women — easy prey for the Riftfolk._

_Tiela was pregnant by then, yet still directed her sworn warriors. After all, there were no backmost lines to retreat to. On the even of Falkreath’s worst defeat yet, she gave birth to a girl, with hair red as a vixen’s tail. A bastard she couldn’t keep. A child born to harsh times, under ill omens. Tiela begged Kjeld to take the girl away, for both their sakes. Leave her to the elements, or even to a herdsman of the Rift, for his pardon and her position, and their love._

_But Kjeld wouldn’t. He loved the child, heart tied and hooked and barbed to her, from the moment she was born. His daughter became all he had of the woman he had loved, after he left into the wilds of the Rift. The love he and Tiela had shared asked too much of them both, and loyalty to her and his hold looked set to bring nothing but death for all three of them: father, mother, and daughter._

_He left behind the oath he’d been made to swear. He left behind Falkreath, and whatever might’ve become of his family. He lived as a nameless wanderer, infant daughter swaddled tight to his chest, as he stole and raided herder-groups weaker than him, and fled and hid from those who were stronger._

_He was a brigand, a thief of goats and ponies, and then a turncoat as he turned bounty-hunter for a Rift clanlord, chasing down men such as he had been only a year before. Eventually he left that behind as well. He would be no-one’s bondsman, no-one’s tennant, no-one’s serf or running-dog._

_He named his daughter Shora, and he raised her to be free._


	34. Chapter 34

 

 

Simra jabbed back with an elbow, not hard enough to hurt but still insistent. Like he’d seen the others do with their heels, urging the ponies beneath them from an amble to a trot. He pushed and felt the wary bend of Moridene’s ribs push back.

Mounted behind him, she snorted hard through her nose. A warning huff that teased at Simra’s hair and prickled hot on the back of his neck.

“Hey,” he said, and gave another gentler nudge.

“What you want?” Moridene bristled. “I swear you’re blessed I ain’t already butted you in the back of your head, but do that again and I don’t know how I’ll stop myself!”

For a moment Simra wanted to goad her just once more, to see if she’d really do it. But the thought was fickle and detached. A giggle simmered up in his chest. He stifled it and set the thought aside. He’d grown used to others like it these last two days, tacking intrusive through the waning grey and to the forefront of his mind. Some were just stupid, others dangerous.

“Tell you the truth, Simra, I’m still considering it,” Moridene carried on. “But seeing as that’s near enough the first word you’ve said in – what? – four days, five maybe?…One of your moods. Reckon it must be something damned important to’ve made you quit your sulking…”

Simra scowled down at the tousled mane of the pony beneath them. Colour rose in his cheeks, almost painful. The grey had been forgiving this time. Just a fog amidst his thoughts. Just a few a days lost, too tired to sleep. Still he’d had to fight and fret — live through it. All that, and to them it was only one of his moods. The shame rose up in a wave of sick feeling. Simra had to swallow it down before he could talk.

“I’m being a pain,” he snapped. “A fucking burden like this. Fuck that. Not any more. I’m gonna learn to ride that thing and someone’s gonna fucking teach me.”

With a stab of his hand, Simra pointed at the spare pony, a few strides off. The red-brown mare walked brisk beside Kjeld and the horse he rode. He led it by a rope that began at its makeshift bridle, and finished tangled up in Kjeld’s left fist.

“Ha!” Moridene crowed loud. “Y’all hear that? Flintfingers here’s finally ready to ride his first pony! Shit though,” she continued quieter, speaking just to Simra now. “If it’ll get you out my saddle, I’m all for it.”

“Glad we agree on something,” Simra muttered.

Looking past the spare spotted mare, he squinted, sighting over the plains. A league or so southward, he saw a trembling kind of shade. He’d learnt by now it meant distant rain. He gave a coarse sigh. In less than an hour it’d be on them, dark clouds overhead, soaked to the skin in another Spring shower.

 

_The next stop we made, I tumbled off Moridene’s horse and clambered onto the spotted mare. The others say these horses are smaller than most, but without stirrups or skill, the beast’s back still seemed insurmountable-high. I tried and failed three times amidst laughter before Kjeld knelt, made his hands a step for my boot._

_“Like a little prince!” Moridene managed between gasps of laughter._

_“Prince, is it?” I snarled back. “Fine. When I need a royal shit-shoveller I’ll know just who to—”_

_The retort broke into a yelp. The horse shied under me, twitching its flanks and huffing. I fell, landing in a clumsy roll, picking myself up in a stream of curses. The ground at least was dry, and Kjeld helped me to my feet._

_“Ignore them,” he said. And for a moment he reminded me of Terez. “Keep your mind on you and the horse. Two things till they turn into one thing.”_

_I felt my lip curl, my brows knit._

_“It’ll come.” Kjeld swatted me on the shoulder, bent the knee once more and helped me back up. “You’ll fall again, but next time you’ll land better. And again after that, fall and land and mount again. It’ll come.”_

_I remembered a time when he would have laughed and joked with the others, having his fun before he stepped in to help. But these days Kjeld is serious, cautious, kind in a cold and practical way. And I think I know why. He left all but all of his laughter with Shora, in Siska and Vesh’s care._

_At an easy walk, we carried on slower than before. Kjeld still led my horse. Following him must’ve been familiar to it, for the beast kept up an easy pace. Even so, I fell again after only a little while. This time the others didn’t laugh so much. Mostly they stared as I wasted the good time we’d made over the last few days._

_After that I gritted my teeth and set to task, clamping my legs round the pony’s flanks, gripping so tight my thighs were burning in minutes. Staying upright was hard. It asked a different kind of balance from scampering across a narrow beam or staying afoot as I unloaded cargo from a pitching boat. Soon every muscle at the core of my body was blazing too. But I didn’t fall again until we were an hour or more into the rain. And when I fell that time, it was into mud and clinging grass._

_The rain kept up through the night as we made camp in the pitiful shelter of another tall standing stone. It kept none of the water off, but with our horses lain down and standing round us, we were spared the worst of the wind. All the same, I sat bruised and aching – every muscle tied up in knots – shivering despite our spitting-miserable little fire._

_We ate only wolf meat for maybe the fifth night running, and even our supplies of that are running low. In those five nights I reckon I’ve eaten wolf just about every way you can cook it. A haunch parboiled to soften the toughness and draw out the worst of its gamy tang, then roasted over high flames. Leftover roast, cut in slivers and refried with wild onions in Moridene’s skillet. The paler meat of the underbelly, skewered on green birch twigs and seared over embers. And now, the last of our fresh cuts – the shanks and other bony parts – stewed, with hunks of hardybread thrown in toward the end, to soak and float like makeweight dumplings._

_Still, it warmed us. And we spoke a little. About how the storm at least will have covered our tracks. About how the next day should bring us to the borders of where we need to be. The beginning of the end of our journey._

_I slept sitting up, wrapped up in my mantle with my back to the stone. But my sleep was deep as death, and I woke soaked and cold and painful, but not so tired as I’ve been lately._

_The rain has passed, making it safe to write now. No breakfast this morning. That’d start our appetites working, make them expectant of things we couldn’t afford to give. So we keep our hunger dull in the backgrounds of our bellies, and mount up with the dawn._

 

The spotted mare peered at Simra. One big pale-brown eye stared from the side of its head, unblinking between the locks of its long wild mane. Nostrils flaring, ears all in twitch, the pony quested forward with a crane of its neck, then drew back. It huffed wet and rumbling.

Simra stepped back nervous before he realised he’d done it. He looked over his shoulder, searching for Kjeld, but found him busy with his bags and his own mount.

Then the horse was moving, plodding away from Simra. It was inching toward Ieva, ears angled curious towards her. She stood in her sodden fur coat, belted birch-trunk narrow round her waist, both palms held out open to the horse. Clicking in her throat, she seemed to invite it over. It stopped before Ieva, eyeing and sniffing at her easily.

The interest it showed her made its reaction to Simra clearer for the contrast. Not distrust or fear, but mostly disdain. He watched Ieva, halfway between envy and amazement.

Snuffling and lipping wet against her open palm, the mare stood still as Ieva murmured something in its ear. Her accent was thicker now, her speech more natural than when she spoke to Kjeld or Mere or Simra. Bright and sharp her eyes, steady her hands, combing now and stroking through the pony’s mane.

“Come over,” she said to Simra. “Slow. Calm. You’re scared and she knows it. Lucky she didn’t mirror your fear back, get scared too. They do that. Sense what you’re feeling and feel it too.”

“If you’re trying to put me at ease round these things, saying they’ll read my thoughts and kick or bite me over what they find isn’t the right way to go about it…” Simra muttered, but walked closer, slow like she’d said.

Ieva reached out with one slow hand and wrapped it round his wrist. She set his palm flat against the horse’s neck, still speaking in its ear, mild and monotone. Simra felt a pulse beneath the beast’s russet coat. It was easing, fast to slow.

“They’re curious,” Ieva said from the far side of the horse’s neck. “Let her get to know you.” She took his other hand then, and cupped it under the horse’s muzzle, just as she had done herself.

“I rode her most of yesterday.” Simra tensed. Thinking blunt teeth. Thinking lost fingers. “Doesn’t she know me by now?”

“If you’re scared, don’t let her know it,” said Ieva. “She allowed yesterday for Kjeld’s sake. Yesterday she was his. Today she’s yours. Doesn’t know if she likes the idea. So she’s testing you.”

It mouthed and snuffed at Simra’s palm and fingers. His whole arm stiffened against the urge to yank his hand away, grimacing. But he resisted. And in return, the horse didn’t bite.

Ieva backed off, unhobbled the mare, untying the rope from loose round its ankles. It hoofed at the ground, tentative, stretching its legs.

Simra was left with both his hands on its neck, near its strange long head. “Fine,” he said, more than half for his own benefit. “It’s fine. This is fine. It doesn’t fucking matter what you say. Just say it slow and even. Slow and fucking even if you love your life at all…”

The horse shook its head, gave a small questioning whicker. Simra smoothed a few falls of mane back from out of its eyes, carrying on in a crooning mumble.

“Here,” Ieva said from behind him, handing him one of the makeshift bridles they’d tied together from braided rope. “Let her see it. Smell it. Then put it on. Slow…”

Simra did as he was told. When Ieva crouched, patted her shoulder, he stepped light as he could onto it, mounted up, and curled his legs round the horse’s ribs. He tried to empty his head, letting the small-gnawing fear go through small actions, repeating and repeating. He stroked the horse’s mane with two fingers, thought of nothing but breathing.

The others were mounted now. Kjeld on his blackfooted grey. Moridene on her leather-brown gelding. All but Ieva, who still stood beside Simra in wait.

“When the others go, she will too,” she said. “Horses like to follow. Keep your seat, keep the reins still, and you’ll be fine.”

Kjeld and Mere bantered over their course for a brief while, then Kjeld led off at a brisk walk. South and a little east, Simra reckoned, by the long westreaching shadow the standing stone cast from the rising sun.

Eager not to be left behind, the spotted mare urged out at a sudden trot. Simra shrilled in surprise as the horse bumped from under him. He fell hard onto the soft muddy ground, all knees, arse and elbows.

“Bleached bones of the unburnt dead!” he hissed to himself. “Right now? Really? Straight a-fucking-way? And you!” He looked at the mare as it stopped, rounded to look at him with one eye. The glimmer in it looked like laughter, but he spoke calmer as he approached. “Careful next time, if you fucking please. Thrown me again. Fine. You’ve made your point. But what’ll the others think, hm? Lagging behind like this, hm? Here…Here. I’ve got a thought…”

He took off his rain-damp mantle, let the mare sniff at the napped leather outside and the fleece within. Gently, gently, he eased it over the horse’s back. It draped down lopsided on one flank, and no matter how he tried, its shape wouldn’t sit straight. But it would do.

“You gonna let me on easy now?” he said softly. “Come on, you little beast, just this once…They’re already ages ahead. Come on…”

The mare dipped its head just a little. That was all the assent he was going to get, Simra reckoned. Now or never. He leapt clumsy onto the makeshift saddlecloth, teetered and got ready to fall, hissing a breath between his gritted teeth. But he stayed. The hiss became a sigh.

“Oh you beauty,” he crooned, bending down flush to the horse’s neck. “If they’d only told me what to poke to say ‘go’…”

But the mare started from under him again, shifting through a walk to a hard canter in barely a few steps. Simra gripped with his legs. His thighs hurt, his backside bruised against the mare’s spine, but with the fleece inside and leather out of the mantle beneath him, the jar of it was less painful, the grip less slippery. This time he stayed seated, bent over the mare’s neck, knuckles tight on the reins.

Closing the distance with the others, Simra saw Ieva ride up on his left. She broke effortless from a quick surge of speed to a canter that matched his mare’s.

“Shoulders still,” Ieva called over the sound of their hoofbeats. “But not like that! Not stiff. Hips relaxed, flow like she flows. Don’t look down, look where she’s going!”

Simra tried to do as he was told, and found he could do only one at a time. He realised the truth in Ieva’s words. He wasn’t leading. He was letting himself be carried where the horse wanted to go. Somehow it was easier once he admitted it.

“You’re not a good rider,” Ieva noted, just before they joined the others. “Lucky though. She’s a good horse…”

 

 

 


	35. Chapter 35

 

 

_The sun’s begun to rise in the Shadow sign. No clear idea how many days have dawned this way, and no true sense of the date, except to say that Second Seed has started._

_Between heavy-driving rains, the days have got longer, warmer. Spring. But for all the scents that brings on the breeze, and all the plainsflowers in bloom, there’s little to eat here in the barren open. Scant little even to burn for our campfires, as the nights carry on cool._

_Bruises cover me. Each stands blue-black testament to the fact that I’m still a piss-poor rider. But I’ve fallen less these last two days. Not so much from growing skill as thanks to a pair of small clevernesses. First, the saddlecloth I rigged from my mantle for a softer seat and stronger grip. Second, a makeshift kind of stirrups: the spare length of rope I carry at my waist, looped round the withers of my mare. The others laughed a while, then mostly followed suit._

_Still, I’ve little to no control over the pony. It follows the others, and I rub my thighs raw, set my whole body aching from the ribs down, just to stay seated. But Ieva told me that’s how Rift children learn, riding their first ponies as they follow the rest of the clan. Even the best riders of the Rift, she said, are only as good as their horse. They try to direct their mounts less than’s common among other peoples. They don’t train a horse to obey, but rather to know what its rider needs from it. The riders of the Rift don’t control so much as guide, suggest, and trust._

_“That’s their greatest strength,” Kjeld told me. “And their biggest weakness. They train their horses but they keep their natures intact, their instincts whole. In the West they break their mounts — they’ll run onto a pike or a stake rather than risk their master’s crop or spurs. The Rift and eastwards though? The beasts they ride stay beasts. A Rift pony will spook or run where another would charge or stand. Remember that, if you have to fight a man riding one…”_

 

_Pain and discomfort dog me these days. But for all the long hours of riding and nights of snatched sleep and standing watch, I’m learning things. Bettering myself. That’s a balm that makes these drawbacks easier to bear. All knowledge is good knowledge. So I gather scraps and shreds of skill wherever I can, from whatever source. And like so many things in life, it’s a little like rag-picking — a search for things worth keeping._

_On a whim I tried the mantra that Clovis taught me. I opened my journal, found the incantation among last month’s margins. I’ve taken to muttering it in spare moments – the half-sung cycle of it, flowing with my motions – as I gather fuel for nighttime fires, or pack my things, or ride throughout the day. It’s weak. Or rather I don’t yet know how to make it stronger. But it’s still there — a warm golden glimmer, jangling on the edges of my nerves, soothing what hurts and quieting what wants to groan or cry out._

_For their part, Kjeld and Moridene have both tried to better my swordsmanship. A quick cycle of motions in the morning before we mount up and set off. By night and by our meagre little fires, a trick that might save my life in ending another’s. Or else an attempt to iron out some crease or other in my technique. And in truth, my sword-work is mostly creases._

_Kjeld is a sly fighter. Between axe and long-knife, he reckons each has its place and its proper uses. The axe is a decoy, more obviously fierce, sharper and harder and wider in its movements. It darts out, thrown or arcing in a long cut, or held close to the head, adding iron to a punching fist. But mostly it does so to make way for the knife, which slips past the defences opened or staggered by the hatchet._

_He tried to teach me to throw an axe like he does. I couldn’t get a feel for its spin, hitting handle-first more often than not. But he told me to remember how even the handle had given me the chance to move in with my blade, on the night we stole our ponies. How could I forget…_

_He fights with a shield too, in times that call for it. The flat round linden-board kind that many Nords favour. No sense, he said, in teaching me to hold and wield one. I need at least a hand free to work any magic. But he’s been teaching me to fight a man that uses one. Circle to the left, and to the left, and to the left. Don’t try to get past the shield. Don’t fight the shield itself, for it’s a weapon in its own right, and a distraction like his axe. Cut for the wrists and fingers, the knees, the ankles. Feint and feint again, for steel’s quicker than a sturdy shield._

_“Shields are wood,” I pointed out. Panting as he worked to train me. Warm against the evening cold. “Wood burns. A snap of my fingers, I could make them drop it. Why learn all this?”_

_“Don’t be so sure. It’s never good to have just one way of beating someone. Or to let magic become a crutch for real skill in battle…”_

_He left a bad taste in my mouth, saying that. But I carried on learning. All knowledge is good knowledge, I reminded myself. I’m using just the sort of blade Terez told me I was too weak to wield. But every minute I train with it, the lighter the iron seems and the stronger my arm._

_“Don’t swing,” he told me. “It’s slower. Easier to tell where a swing is coming from and where it’ll strike. Easier to block. Hacking and slashing’s good for tricking someone and not much else. Against a shield, you’ll blunt your blade before you break the wood. Go for the thrust. The thrust that comes under the shieldwall!”_

_That night I went to bed a knot of keening muscle. I lay in my bedroll, whispering Clovis’ mantra till I fell asleep._

_Moridene is Kjeld’s opposite in a lot of ways. She even defends by attacking, keeping up a storm of arcing blows, insistent thrusts, great raking sweeps. Don’t give the person you’re fighting a chance to think, let alone act. Keep them on the backfoot, defending. A bad fighter will make a mistake soon enough. Even a good one will be forced to play your game, on your terms. Or so she reckons. She has a stout-bladed little shortsword, but even with it in hand, she fights like she’s using a polearm — like her body is missing her glaive._

_She fights partly armoured. But even an unarmoured fighter can learn a little from the way someone fights with mail or plate or scale on their side, she says. When the choice is kill or be killed, it’s good to learn ways you can suffer a graze, a bruise – a wound you’ll survive – in trade for something that’ll finish your opponent. Ways to turn the body with a blow, let your armour and motion shape and dampen the strike. Ways to make something that’d kill into something that’ll hurt like all the scourges of the Harvester Prince but keep you fighting._

_I keep what she says in mind. There’s some wisdom there. Get too close and a knee or a fist is better than fumbling to fit your long blade into a short space. That sort of brutal wisdom. But I wonder how much is posturing and boasting, and how much tried and tested in actual battle. With Moridene it’s always hard to tell._

_I also asked Mere half-joking if he would teach me to use a bow. He guffawed, told me I was ten years too old and as many times too weak. That if he began to teach me now, I’d be old and grey – “greyer still,” he said – before I could draw with enough power to kill. He meant it as a mockery and an insult._

_“Well,” I said. “If looking like you’s what it takes to bend your height in mulberry, I reckon I’m fine without…”_

_The lopsided strength of his right shoulder. The twisted bunching of his muscles. The ways his body has broken itself to such a particular purpose disturbs me. So mostly I’m glad Mere’s is a path long closed to me._

_Hungry. Like my guts are gnawing at themselves, fighting for any scraps of meat left on me. That’s the one discomfort I can’t reason away as the price of learning. A lifetime between its teeth has taught me more than I’d like to know about hunger._

_For once I have the coin to feed myself, but no way to spend it. Strange, how little the weight of my purse matters out here._

_But Kjeld has started his tracking. Looking at sad rings bleached into the grass, testing earth, dung, and searching for signs the rest of us can’t see. Him and Ieva agree: the fact that game’s so scarce here bodes well. Lately, we were not the first to come this way, and feed ourselves from the fat of the land. Someone else has trimmed it lean, and recently._

 


	36. Chapter 36

_We are being hunted. But unlike most preybeasts, we can’t just run. We’re trapped into our course, keeping it, even as we try to flee. We’ve come too far to just turn tail. And running takes up all our time. Whatever energy’s left after hunger has leeched off its share. Daylight, moonlight, starlight. No chance to make another measure of ink from sootblack. I ration my writing._

Simra finished there. A little square of words on the stiff parchment, crabbed into the top of a page. Nothing after and nowhere to go. Just the sheer leap of blank space beneath it, yawning off-white and empty.

He had more thoughts and fears than he’d let himself write. But the day had been rainy till barely an hour ago – wrapped up thick in sheets of thin wet, lashing like seaspray, pervasive as mist – and the dog-eared corners on his journal pages had started to curl in the damp. Simra blew the ink dry as he could and firmly closed the book. If he had a rope or belt to spare, he would have buckled it shut. Anything to keep the pages flat and clear. Instead he stowed it in his satchel, and hoped the fit was tight enough to keep the parchment safe.

A stream ran wide and shallow nearby. Simra sat with the others on its banks. Rust-red dirt, flat brown stones. The noise of the water, and the ponies standing fitful at the streamside, drinking grateful after another few hours’ hard ride.

“They still look happy enough,” grumbled Mere, gesturing vague at the ponies. “We get scrawnier every day, but look at them. Fat and happy as anyone ought to be in Springtime.”

“Makes you ask yourself,” said Rosk, “who’s riding who harder?”

“They eat grass,” Ieva said. “You’d be fat and happy too, if you could do the same.”

“Mmf,” Mere agreed grimly. “The Rift’s got that in droves. A real land of plenty…”

“I would have stolen milking mares,” said Ieva.

“Hunger or horse-milk,” shuddered Mere. “Don’t know what’s worse.”

Simra’s stomach growled and turned, rubbing dry and empty against itself. “And yet you’re happy enough to eat wolf seven days straight,” he said.

“Happy so long as I don’t have to eat grubs and bugs and snakelegs, like your lot do,” Mere clipped back. “Worm eggs and land-jellies…” He shuddered again. But Simra heard Mere’s stomach groan its own reply.

“Who are they?” Simra changed the subject. He knew from long-learning that hunger’s better fed with forgetting than on thoughts of food. “Those riders.”

“Scouts,” said Kjeld, sword-flat but shield-hard. “Outriders. They saw us. Don’t know how many of them, but they know and we know and they know that we know that it’s more than we’ve got.”

Something in the way he spoke made Simra worry. Kjeld was afraid.

“They might be Broken-Thorns,” said Ieva, more evenly. “This is their land. It’s them we’ve come to speak with. If we let them catch us then maybe—…”

“But you can’t be sure,” growled Moridene.

“If I saw them closer up,” Ieva said. “Enough to see the hems on their coats. The tackle on their horses.”

“Fresher horses,” muttered Kjeld. “Faster horses.”

“So fly your bird in,” said Rosk. “If it’s a closer look you need, take one.”

“Bows,” answered Ieva. “There’s at least one among them. Maybe their archer can’t take a bird on the wing. But then again maybe he can. I won’t risk it…Besides, Careban sees different colours from men and mer. It might not help.”

“Then what good is he?” snapped Mere. “Your magic bird with his foreign name? What good’s your seeing-bird if you won’t use him to see!”

The crow ruffled its feathers by Ieva’s side. It dipped its dull-black beak into the glossy-black of its chest and watched Mere with one shining staring eye.

“So they’re faster than us,” said Simra, hurriedly packing the things he’d taken out of his bags.

“And there’s enough of them that they’d tear us to tatters in a fight,” Moridene added, scraping a whetstone down her glaive’s wicked edge.

“The best we can do is run or hide,” Kjeld said. “Follow the stream so it masks our scent, covers our tracks, and hope we can lose them.”

“Or find somewhere their numbers won’t matter,” spat Rosk.

“And how the fuck’re we serving either purpose waiting here?” Simra rose to his feet, boots sliding and noising on the river-stones. “We’re stopped and they’re still riding. Fresher mounts and well-fed riders, right?”

“Reckon I agree with Flintfingers here,” said Moridene, standing now too. “I say we get up, mount up, put some ground between us and them. Least till we know what we’re about.”

One by one the others stood. Their legs were bowed and their shoulders weary-still or shaking with wear. Every pair of eyes among them were ringed dark and redshot with sleepless night after sleepless night. But they went to their horses, took them from the water. In dogged silence, they heaved up into their makeshift saddles, and carried on into the damp and the mist.

Simra knew better than to second-guess his mare. She’d know where best to place her hooves, and what gait and pace would suit them best. A twisted ankle or a fall on these stones could good as kill the horse and strand the rider. It was the same for all of them, Simra reckoned. The going was slow, but better than staying still.

They’d been running nearly two days now.

No-tribe’s land had become Broken-Thorn territory. The goal of this long hard trek went from an itch, vague and half-formed at the back of Simra’s mind, to something that kept him awake nights. Carry a message to the Broken-Thorn clan. Win them over or shatter and scatter them.

With that, the landscape changed around them. The toothless yawn of the plains shuddered up and upward into the shadow of far-off mountains. Rills and coves as their foothills began. Like the ridges of a tree’s roots half-buried in the soil, and growing stronger towards the climb of its trunk. Streams tumbled through the broken up land, carving trenches and valleys to follow or cross. Firs and thorntrees spined the country now, striping the Rift’s long stretches of nothing.

The six had ridden carefully, trying to go secret across uncertain ground. But there were still heaths and stretches of flat to cover. Open ground. They rode hard across them, hoping not to be seen. And still the outriders saw them. An arrow howled out of the sky, falling a ways short of where they’d been moments before. It was a screaming-shot, fluted along its shaft to cry out as it came. A wordless warning. All the same it said the hunt had begun. And that’s how they knew they had at least one archer.

They’d fled ever since. When Simra dared look back, and when there was anything to see, there were only haunted shapes, dark and hard on the foggy horizon. Like they were being ridden down by ghosts.

Now they carried on along the riverbank, teeth gritted and grumbling against the slow going, the narrow choices. The sky overhead was featureless. A weak sun glowered wan through ocean-thick cloud and woollen fog, sickly in the day’s western quarter. There was no sunset. Only a driving and deepening gloom. No light bright enough to cast even a short shadow.

“We can’t ride at night,” said Kjeld, breaking hours of silence. “Not without moons and stars to see by, or risking torch or spell-light.”

The world got grey and lustreless. The shallow stream broadened, waned into a flat-faced ford of calmish water.

“Do we cross it?” asked Simra, stopped and perched on horseback.

His belly stabbed and scraped at him. Aches in the muscle from staying steady so long at a loping uneven walk. An ache in the guts beneath, refusing to go unremembered. His sash felt looser than it ought to round his middle. The fit of his clothes had turned more scarecrow than ever.

Like the Winter his family had spent near-frozen, near-starved. When his father had fallen sick with Rockjoint and couldn’t work the docks. When they’d had no coin for fuel or food in Autumn, and next to nothing stored for what came after. The Winter of Simra’s fourteenth birthday. Weak and skullish-faced, his mother had begun to teach him magic…

“Shit,” muttered Moridene under her breath. The muttering continued on in something that might’ve been a prayer. Not any prayer to any god Simra had ever heard or heard of.

They all looked to Kjeld. He sat silent on the back of his blackfooted grey, jaw set, chewing the inside of his lip. His beard had grown unkempt and wiry, hiding the sink of his cheeks.

“We cross,” he said eventually. “Water doesn’t take tracks, and we need to find rougher ground before full-dark. Trees or suchlike, where can’t be followed riding.”

The six of them dismounted. Simra awkwardly, yanking his mare’s mane so as not to fall, then stroking it guiltily flat. Two abreast they led their ponies into the ford.

The water was biting-cold, soaking Simra’s boots, numbing his toes till they felt like nubs of bone then spars of nothing. He thought again of the Winter his family had starved. Of the finger Soraya lost to frostbite, leaving the warren, braving the cold to steal sour tallow and black famine-bread, and keeping them alive.

“This is better.” Ieva walked next to him, leading her own pony with a hand over its neck. Her crow perched on the crest of its shoulders. “It will take more riders longer to ford this river, going two by two. If they follow, it will slow them.”

With the stream crossed and the horses remounted, Simra’s boots squelched and shook with water. Heels couched gentle to the flanks of his mare, soles arched over the rope ring of his makeshift stirrups. “If I lose toes to a walk through a fucking puddle…” he muttered, teeth chattering, but didn’t continue.

On the stream’s far side now, they urged their ponies up the slope of its bank. A stretch of ragged pasture humped on from the streamside. The horses yearned up into a quick-ambling trot, like they were celebrating the easier footing.

And then it was dark. And they were walking, keeping track of each other through stage-whispered words and birdcalls, and shifts of solid darkness against the more liquid dark of night.

Branches scraped on Simra’s brow and hands. His hearing pricked sharp, making everything a fright or a threat. Every sigh and huff his mare made. Every footfall that wasn’t his own. But they carried on, hungry enough and tired enough now that the need for sleep and the time for sleeping had grown apart. Everything hurt or wore or gnawed enough that all the body’s needs mattered as little as each other.

At some point they slept. Standing probably, like horses do. Slumped against the necks and shoulders of their mounts, arms wrapped round their warmth and smell. Like riders frozen on the brink of saddling up once more.

Daylight broke too early. Showering the trees, bleak on their branches, they showed as cracked-ice lines of black against the eye-white sky.

Simra woke half-drenched with dew. Aketon heavy with it, scarf sodden and noose-like clinging with it. Gazing bleary, he saw the trees were too well-placed to be wild. They grew even-spaced, planted and pruned with low broad splays of branches, stemming out from their yoked and forked trunks. Promises of colour nestled amongst the green leaves.

“Apricots,” Simra breathed through teeth bared in a grin. “Apricots!” He barked louder now, on the edge of laughing.

They were hard-fleshed, suede-skinned, papery-dry towards their whorled and spiralled pits. But it was more than they’d dared to hope for. It was enough.


	37. Chapter 37

The distance had closed. Was closing. Was closer still with every drum and tumble of hooves. With fresher horses, fresher riders better fed, their pursuers were gaining ground. What had been a lead of hours had turned hectic, a chase measured out in bowshots and minutesworth of frenzied galloping.

The six hared through a tangle of trees. The desperate rhythm of their horses’ hooves muffled against the leafmulch. Soft somehow, like a butcher’s hammer tendering meat. Less hoof and more heartbeat, heard through the skin and bone of a chest. They leaned low in their saddles, flush close to the necks of their ponies. They bobbed and jerked from snarled branches while the horses veered and scudded between the trunks and shrubs and matted thorns.

Simra’s ears hurt, pained at by the whistling wind. One of his cheeks was hot, thickly wet. The feeling spread to the corner of his mouth and he tasted blood. Something had struck him, switching over his face and laying open the skin like a rider’s crop. No knowing when, no time to check the cut. There was only the straining muscles of the mare beneath him, the short-drawn harried breath they shared.

The stretch of trees thinned and dwindled to nothing. Ahead a gentle slope swept down into a mud-logged valley. A murder of birds spun dark against the flat white skin of the sky. The six were already fleeing down the hill and into the valley, groaning horses trying in vain to slow their pace.

They were going to die. How long before one of the ponies broke its leg, twisted an ankle this way? Simra was torn between wanting answers and dreading them. What would it take for a horse to die of exhaustion? A shorter or longer while than it would take for them all to be caught?

A sob of awful laughter choked up from his tight-pressed chest, then stopped behind his gritted teeth. His eyes were streaming, his hair slick flat to his skull with sweat. Everything was suspended. Beyond the pulse and punishment of the ride, and the terror of their charge downhill, Simra felt like he was falling. Weightless and wondering what mattered. Neck and shoulders twisting painful, he braved a look behind him.

A broad line of riders broke from the treeline, same as they had only minutes before. Dark beards and stubbled scalps, hands filled with weapons of wood and horn and iron, raised and pumping at the air already in triumph. Piebald horses and mud-spattered greys. Riding coats hemmed with burnt-orange. No sense to the cascade of sights, except the thinning gap between the tail of Simra’s horse and the foaming muzzles of theirs. As he watched, the line distended. Its outermost edges surged forward, putting on a fierce lurch of speed.

“Horns!” Kjeld cried above the noise of their flight. “They’re forming horns! Making to charge!”

Moridene swung her pony between Simra and Kjeld. Her face was tight and drawn, hair streaming in the wind, tied into knots by the breeze. “Time for a change of plan?” She held her glaive in one hand, gripping it like a cavalry spear.

“Fight them?” yelled Mere, hoarse-voiced and panting. “Fight that?! If you’ve got a plan…that doesn’t involve all of us…fucking dying…I’m dying to fucking hear it!”

“Not just them!” Ieva shrilled from a scant ways ahead. She was pointing.

Another line of figures bristled on the horizon ahead. A dozen or so, dark against the white sky, standing up in their stirrups on the valley’s far side.

“Bastards’ve driven us straight into a trap.” Kjeld was taking the lead now, powering on neck-to-neck with Ieva’s horse. “Like herding sheep…”

Simra’s eyes swept down the valleyside ahead of them. Down from where the new riders stood and watched, into the churned and pitted mud of the valley floor. A long streak of trickling water crawled through the dirt. It carried on down the valley’s course and disappeared into a thicket of snarling thorns and briars, cruel stunted darkwood shrubs, spurs of broken stonework.

“There.” Ieva had seen it too, and kneed her pony towards it.

“Just like you said,” Rosk shouted. “Somewhere their numbers won’t matter.”

With death behind them and death ahead, a stand was their only chance at surviving now. No choice to be made. There was a kind of freedom in that.

An arrow yelped over Simra’s head, nearly silent till it was nearly too late. It missed by only a foot or two. On level ground it would have struck him full in the chest, taken him from his horse, had him tumbling hard down the slope. The slope itself had saved him, just as it emptied into the muddy flat of the valley floor. Together, the six of them powered towards the stone-shot thicket, straining a final burst of speed from their mounts.

Rosk’s horse staggered, one hoof landing badly. The leg bent awkward, giving way. Rosk fell thrashing from the saddle, rolling into the mud. Kjeld galloped by, Mere soon after. The thicket wasn’t far now. Rosk clambered to his feet, lurching and hurrying on. Simra passed him, threw himself from horseback, landed sprawled but steady on his hands and feet.

“In!” barked Kjeld. “All in! Weapons out!”

Blood pounded in Simra’s head. He looked back. Moridene and Ieva had dismounted earlier, helping Rosk along. His horse threshed and screamed on its side in the dirt. Rosk was limping. And behind them all, both bands of riders were storming down the valleysides, sliding and careering too fast now to stop. Both had gone into the same formation. Horns, crescent moons — two sets of pincers ready to snap tight shut.

Simra turned and ran, hand on the hilt of his sword. He met the outermost thorns of the thicket, writhed and wormed his way in. Within moments he had a hundred new cuts to ignore — a choir of scrapes, pricks, grazes. But Kjeld and Mere had gone before him, breaking ground and clearing a path. At his rear there were more struggling sounds now. He hoped it was Moridene, Ieva, Rosk.

Rosk and Kjeld hunkered in the broken lean of a half-fallen archway. Creepers and vines, long thorn-spurred branches clung to the dark stone, prised apart the ancient mortar of the rocks. More arches followed after – some proud-standing, others shattered and tumbledown – in something like an overgrown alleyway.

Simra joined them. He squatted immediate, bent over his knees, screaming in breath after ragged breath, paining his hungry lungs to try and heal them. Dim through the hurt, he remembered what Kjeld had said, and drew his sword. No blood to seal it fast in the scabbard this time. It slithered nearly soundless, but felt heavier than ever in his hand.

The last three joined them. Hissing with pain, Rosk was already unslinging his shield, unsheathing his own bigger blade. Kjeld stood ready, shield and long-knife in hand, shaking indignant, waxen pale. Moridene leaned on the shaft of her glaive, shoulders heaving and hair hanging. Bow unwrapped and strung now, Mere stood with an arrow nocked, half-drawn. Simra got up, stood next to Moridene in a knife-fighter’s crouch. Ieva stood unarmed to his left. Their breath strained and rasped as one.

Simra tried to think of fire between his fingers. To remember the words that would call it. What he recalled scared him — too broken, too garbled. Useless. They would die.

Somewhere Rosk’s lamed horse screamed in the fen beyond the thicket. Glimpses of the world outside showed through the thorns and branches. They waited, hearts groaning-full, trying to steal glimpses into the outside and dreading what they’d see.

Simra shivered, missing his mantle. “Wish we hadn’t had to leave the horses,” he said, half-afraid of the silence. His voice was thin as he strained for something to say.

“Leaving the horses,” said Kjeld. “Having to. That was the whole plan. Impossible to follow in here on horseback. Hard to come in force. A scrawny slip of a chance, but the best chance we’ve got.”

“What I mean,” said Simra, “is that I could be wearing my saddlecloth right now…” One weak syllable of laughter, then nothing. But some noise – some talk – was better than nothing. He didn’t want to hear his thoughts.

Beyond the thicket, a shout went up. Ten shouts, twenty, more.

“That them?” said Moridene.

“That’s them,” hissed Rosk.

“Stormwinds,” cursed Kjeld. “Warcries. They’re coming. Be ready.”

“You bet I’m bloody ready,” Mere growled, tramping forward, drawing his bow fully. The bowshaft keened as it bent. He sighted brief down the heavy war-arrow, then let fly between the branches.

There was no cry or scream, then tens at once. The drumming of hooves, the ring of steel, and the voices of riders and horses in pain. The sounds continued, in wax and wane like waves at sea. Quiet then another flurry of noise.

Mere walked back to where the others were clustered, tense and waiting. He nocked a second arrow to his string.

“That’s so much buzzard spit,” breathed Moridene. “Ain’t no chance one arrow did that.”

“It didn’t,” said Kjeld, a grin keen-edged in his voice. “Those’re battle sounds. They’re doing it to each other.”

“Fuck it,” Simra snapped, “I’m taking a look.”

Between ignorance and answers, he’d take answers. He struggled a short way back through the undergrowth. No one stopped him as he went. At a spot where the branches were scant enough to see through, he crouched, watching. Even then there was little to see.

A scattered melee of fighters, grappling, tumbling, pacing and hacking at each other on foot. And at the heart of that chaos, a pinwheel of riders circled and circled on horseback. They drew spirals in the valley. Up one hillside, down and onto the next. The circles grew tight then spun loose once more, as the riders watched for weakness, seizing upon or veering away from new angles of attack. He’d seen nothing like it before. Only birds fighting or mating on the wing came close.

The fighting on foot ground on. Frantic exchanges became exhausted trades of blows, fitful like an animal twitching even after the light’s gone already from its eyes.

One rider split off from their spiral and fled at a charging gallop towards where Simra hid. Mud burst up from behind his horse’s blurring hooves. Simra crouched rooted to the spot, hoping not to be seen. But the rider was close enough to see properly in only two blinks of an eye. Young, clean-shaven or else beardless, with a shorn scalp and a single long dark forelock hanging down towards his panicked eyes.

A dark streak of something thrummed up from where the fight had raged. It drew a shallow arc in the sky, then sped forward like a diving hawk. The arrow slammed between the young rider’s shoulderblades. It crushed him down onto the neck of his horse, then out of his saddle. Dragged in the mud by one awkward-twisted foot that had tangled in the stirrup, eventually the body tore free. The pony ran on, leaving the corpse lumpen and bundled in the dirt.

Amidst the distant remains of the skirmish, Simra saw someone raise a recurved bow skyward in triumph. Another cry went up, victorious this time. Simra scrambled back through the undergrowth.

“Dead,” he spat, coming back to the others. “They’re dead.”

“Who?” said Ieva.

“Don’t know which.”

“Mangle and break me,” Rosk cursed in a groan.

“Then how do we—…” began Moridene. “What do we—?”

“You!”

A new voice carried through the branches. A woman’s voice, mid-low but raised either crazed or joyous. Simra hissed like a cornered cat between his teeth, clammy palm tightening round his swordgrip.

“You footlings in the thicket,” the woman’s voice carried on. The tone of it, Simra realised, was partly breathless. Battle-blood burnt in her words. “The dogs who followed you are dead. You have moments to tell me why you shouldn’t end up the same way.”

“Shit…”

“Shit shit shit,” Simra growled.

Ieva stepped forward, staff in hand, and called out in a language Simra couldn’t make sense of.

“Riftspeak,” said Kjeld. “I knew it. I knew it…”

The woman outside the thicket replied in the same tongue. Once again, Ieva spoke back. Shouted, Simra reckoned, it sounded like the yowling of foxes, with only the stiff consonants for contrast.

“Who is she?” he whispered.

Ieva said something in Riftspeak. Asking the same question, perhaps.

“Her name is Kitlun,” said Ieva finally, “of the Broken-Thorns. Third-daughter of Attabir Nineday, once-clanlord of the Broken-Thorns.”

“Once?” repeated Mere. “That’s the clanlord we’re to talk with! Why once?”

“The word she used,” said Ieva. “It means he’s dead. Recently dead.”

The woman – Kitlun’s – voice hammered through the thicket again.

“She says,” Ieva translated, “that she won’t kill us yet. Not if we come with our weapons sheathed. She – uhm – has offered us guest-rights for the night.”

“What choice’ve we got?” said Simra.

“Shit all,” said Kjeld.

Simra breathed a long sigh, finally tired, through to his marrow.


	38. Guest-Rights Among the Riftfolk / The Story of Kitlun Broken-Thorn

_They rounded up our horses and the horses of the dead. Those still fit for riding. Rosk’s was among the ones they butchered there on the battlefield. They slaughtered the enemy wounded, impassive while they did for them as with their horses. Meat and plunder, unspent arrows, and us. The six of us. They took it all uphill the way they’d come._

_We slogged and trudged, half-dead on our feet even before the upslope climb. Single file, Ieva at our head and Kjeld at our rear. I walked in our middle, like in Antolios’ bulwark._

_On either side, Kitlun’s riders surrounded us, and herded our horses by the reins. Some of the Riftfolk were blood-drenched, blacked out from their wounds. Slung across their saddles, or slumped against the necks of their long-suffering ponies, they woke only to groan or cry out as a sudden motion opened up a cut that had clotted over. Kitlun had started with twelve riders. One was killed in the skirmish. Of the others, only six were still fighting-fit. But those six watched us with readied axes, strung bows, javelins already in hand._

_“At least let us have our horses,” I said to one of them, too tired to think before I spoke. “It’d make the climb quicker. Easier on us all.”_

_“And it would tempt you to foolishness,” said the rider, accent thick and coarse. “You would try to run. We would catch you. This way is better for us both, footling.”_

_He was a pale man with a broad and flat-cheeked face. Skullish about the jaws and eyes — more so for his shaved scalp and iron-grey forelock. A peaked leather cowl was tied at his neck and hung down his back. An axe with a long shaft and thin head in his grip. A wool riding coat, double-breasted and fastening on the left, hemmed in charcoal-black like the others’._

_“He’s right,” Ieva said without looking back. “But for more reasons than he says. We’ve ridden the horses hard enough these last few days. Today especially. Let them walk unburdened. Then let them rest.”_

_She chose Eastmarch words. A dialect we would all understand – except perhaps Moridene – but with words that might be strange to the Riftfolk. I wondered how much they understood. And I wondered why Ieva chose heavy Marchspeak over a more common tongue of Tamrielic. To put us at ease among foreigners, or to let us share secrets?_

_The climb ran us ragged. Kitlun’s warband left us with their wounded, as half her able riders set camp and watched us, while the others searched out fuel for fire. We collapsed, huddled together half-heaped, breathing ragged and miserable._

_I murmured Clovis’ mantra to myself, squatting on my burning haunches low to the ground. The cuts and scrapes and bruises I’d earnt chimed in one by one. The mantra didn’t silence them. It never does. But perhaps they were quieter — easier to bear while I tried to catalogue them. A straight gash, low across my right cheek, and prone to bleed when it opens, but maybe not so deep. Another more ragged gouge on the upside of my left forearm. That one hurts the worst, jagged and throbbing._

_Our weapons were not taken. Just Moridene’s glaive, which of course she can’t keep sheathed. But we were told in clear terms that the first of us to reach for a weapon would watch the others die, then die themselves. After the fire was lit, and meat was roasting, the Riftfolk sheathed their weapons too, and sat with us as guests._

_“Drink,” said Kitlun firmly, passing round a warmed drinking-bowl. “Twice. Once for our good faith, and once for yours. We are guests and hosts. The trust between us could cut either way. Either one of us.”_

_She drank first. When it came to me, the scent of the drink rose and fogged over me, sharp in my nose and throat. But I drank. And the flavour was of stone-fruit, bitter herbs, then a lingering sickly sweetness. The burn of alcohol came after, mule-kicking strong. Like the spirit Clovis used to still. The drink that Siska gave me like medicine. This too burnt in my throat and made me wince as it blazed in my near-empty belly._

_Mezga, Ieva called it. A kind of mead-brandy the Riftfolk make from fermented honey and stilled fruit. The bowl went round once more, refilled halfway through. We each drank again._

_Into the swimming silence that came after, Ieva spoke to Kitlun._

_Ieva, scrawny in her coats, skinny as an owl beneath its bulk of feathers, hair long and dark and snarling. Kitlun, in her charcoal-hemmed riding coat, dyed sky-blue and broidered with quiet patterns in another subtly different shade. Soft grey fur at the coat’s collar. One sleeve opened to the shoulder by a line of buttons, showing the lean bare left arm of an archer. But they looked similar, in their way. Both had the look of the Rift in them. In their dark hair, their hooded eyes, the line of their cheeks._

_Ieva told Kitlun that we had come to speak with her father. With her people, the Broken-Thorn clan. Kitlun gestured about her and said coldly, in Skyrim’s common Tamrielic:_

_“Then you have come to the right place. These are my people. The Broken-Thorns. All of them that yet live.”_

_As the mezga bowl refilled, and went round once more, she told us a tale. The how and the why of her clan’s pared and thinned and threshed state. Herself and eleven riders, all grim-faced and worn, five wounded too badly to fight or even ride at speed._

_Kitlun told her tale as three Riftmen wrapped the one of their number that had died today. They murmured low and mournful songs, wrapping her in a white sheet, bound about with blue twine, green rope, till she was covered and still. A shape, not a corpse._

_The story ran as follows._

_The lives and loves of a Riftfolk clanlord are not their own. Their duty is to their people and to tradition — a kind of living sacrifice. So when the time comes for a child of the clan’s ruling family to be betrothed, a match is chosen for them, always from another clan. For a year a boy is sent away to work for his betrothal amongst the people from whom he’ll one day take a wife. A dowry of travel and labour, days and hours, in return for a wife — new blood, new crafts, new ideas to bring back to his clan._

_When the day came for Kitlun’s eldest brother, Haligur, to make that journey, she sobbed and bawled. She wept into her mother’s coat until the felt was wet through and stained a blue as deep as the night sky, shimmering with salt as it dried. She wailed to see him go. Still he went, riding alone with a single pony to the lands of the Weeping-Cloud clan._

_For a year, Kitlun grew from a child into a young woman. She learnt to shoot a war-bow and not only a feeble little hunting piece. She chose from the herds of her father, Attabir Nineday. Picked out the first pony she would ever truly own, and not only borrow. A silvery-coated mare with spots of blue-black and a mane the colour of silver._

_And the day Haligur returned, she realised all the grief she’d felt, and forgotten. Because she remembered it again, and felt it knit and mend like a rent-open wound inside her. It was good to see him. Better still to see him happy, riding abreast with his bride on another smooth-coated pony._

_Adlakan, second-daughter of clanlord Csengir of the Weeping-Clouds. She was a good match to the son and heir of Attabir Nineday, clanlord of the Broken-Thorns. A complimentary match and a clever one. For in those days, the Broken-Thorns were a power throughout the South-Western Rift. No wanderer family, or rover-band, or any other clan dared raid their herds of goats, ponies, and cattle. In Spring they ate sweet stone-fruit from their orchards. Even in the cruelest Winters, they had a hall of stone and timber, cask upon cask of mezga to warm them, and they never went hungry. Adlakan seemed proud. Pleased to be a part of such a strong clan._

_The Broken-Thorns prospered from the match. Their herds and those of the Weeping-Clouds shared pasture. Trade between the clans made both rich._

_For two years they prospered. And in the third year, Csengir asked Attabir to join him in raiding the clans to the north of their mountain-and-foothill homelands. They rode out. Attabir, old but strong still, and armoured in rawhide sewn with lap upon lap of iron plate, mined from the underbellies of the Jeralls. Armed with a long straight rider’s sword and a long-hafted rider’s axe. A bow of horn and wood and sinew and a bow-arm strong enough to punch through shields, deeply dent an iron breastplate at a hundred paces. And his firstborn son rode alongside him._

_They were gone half another year. Kitlun stayed behind. When she saw them leave, this time she did not cry. By now she was grown, and strong at least as they were. She and Adlakan remained, to ride the plains and govern the herders in Summer, and keep the hall in Winter. And Adlakan was as clever in both those ways as Kitlun was in the ways of mount, sword, and bow._

_It was the depths of Winter when Csengir and his riders returned. With him came the riders of the Broken-Thorn clan, and two bodies wrapped in cloth, bound in blue and green. Father and son, side by side._

_And now Kitlun wanted to cry more than ever she had before. A well of sorrow inside her, surging up yet dark and deep, and endless echoing, drinking down whatever in her was still aboveground. Making it cold. Making it cold and drowned. And the tears wouldn’t come. Perhaps because the sorrow was too great. Perhaps because she was clanlord now, and a clanlord must not break._

_Csengir had come to deliver her brother and father for death-rites. Kitlun ushered him into the outer walls of the hall. Her hall now. And with him came the Broken-Thorn warriors, returned to their once-lord’s home to pay their respects as he and his heir were given back to the spirits of the mountains and the plains, and the gods beyond the sky._

_That evening there was solemn feasting. Toasts drunk to a great man. And that night Csengir, and his riders, and the riders that had once ridden for Attabir Nineday and had sworn to ride for his son, turned on the remaining Broken-Thorns. So many murdered in their beds. So many others died as the great hall’s timbers burnt, and the stones blackened and cracked. In those flames, Csengir had reforged two clans into one, and cast the dross off into the snow._

_Adlakan – the woman whose marriage had started that merge – turned a knife on Kitlun for her father’s sakes. Each woman had called the other sister. But that night they fought, turning and turning over on the floor of a hall just beginning to darken with smoke. Red to the shoulder, red about the mouth, red down her chest and nicked and cut with wounds, Kitlun fought her way from the hall._

_Knowing there was no revenge and no reward in dying that night, she ran. Away into a deep Winter, with no herds and one horse._

_On good days, she hunted. On bad days, she starved. But through all those cold months, she survived. And come Spring, one warrior who had been loyal to her father found her. In the following years, more followed. Clanless wanderers. Men and women loyal to her father. Instead of hiding from their finding eyes, she set out to find them. They are her tribe. The entirety of it, for now. And she and they and all of them will one day be revenged._


	39. Chapter 39

_I spoke up. Across the fire of dry-thorny brush and parched dung, I met Kitlun’s eyes and talked to her. My words were broad Tamrielic. The widest net of words I could find: motley and ancient, the tongue used for trade all across the continent, and made halfway official by the Empire._

_And I considered the words I chose. Weighed them, like a merchant puts coin to the scales to see if it’s clipped or counterfeit. Straining to speak slow and grave, stony with surety, I held back my usual scrabble-and-torrent of talk._

_We’d been sent as envoy to the Broken-Thorn clan. Here was the closest thing it still had to a leader. This youngish woman. I have a bad eye for age in humans, but she couldn’t have had more than half a dozen years on me. Steely-grey mer-angled eyes, skin tanned already by wind, broad cheeks and small impassive mouth. Hair dark and shorn to the quick, everywhere but the utmost crown of her head. It fell from there, beaded and braided, off to one side, in a straight heavy-black tumble, clicking with trinkets. Even seated she was tall, and her bare archer’s arm stood as a silent threat to us all._

_But if I could convince her to ally herself, her people, our envoy was over. A few more good riders for Ulfric’s forces. And for our trouble we’d win the right of riding back to the Vahn. Rejoined, paid, respected maybe._

_“You’ve been wronged,” I said. “No one with a heart to feel and a brain to think could say you’ve not been harshly wronged. But the Rift is at war with itself, and with war comes a chance to win allies.”_

_Or words to that end. My memory’s muddy on the particulars. Align herself with the Eastmarch fyrds, win this war in the Rift, then fall on the Weeping-Clouds with all the force of Ulfric’s gratitude._

_But most likely it was the mezga that spoke through me. I was serious as only the young and drunk and proud can be. Sure of myself, but not even sure of the cause I was asking her to join. After all — when have I ever been told what Ulfric wants with the Rift? With us or any of this? When have I ever believed him to be one for keeping promises, treating fairly with outsiders, repaying gratitude?_

_And Kitlun gave a braying laugh. Whatever words were flowing stopped off dry. I was left blushing ember-bright beneath the dirt of our days-long chase._

_“My clan learnt at great cost,” she said. “The best promises are only air. The worst are arrows fired in the night. Unseen, but flying fast for your back all the same. Kitlun Broken-Thorn does not ride for promises.”_

_Her knack with Tamrielic made me ashamed to have spoken so simply to her. She was fluent, clever, solemn. All the things I’d tried to be. Every bruise and scrape and underskin ache I had felt mocking now. My tongue lay thick and fallow, leaden in my mouth._

_Beside me, Ieva took another drink of Mezga, and began to talk. Riftspeak now. This was a discussion between her and Kitlun. Nodding. Murmurs of assent, interjections from Kitlun’s riders. Quiet uncanny Ieva was the best envoy we could hope for among these people._

_I looked down at the wooden trencher laid before me. Anonymous scraps of horsemeat, threaded onto green spikes of briarwood, charred on the outside, hot and succulent within. And I looked up at the night sky in all its open enormity. And round me at the black expanse of the hillside, and the plains I knew began a little ways through that darkness. And I thought of home._

_Of the warren I was born in, and had slept in near-enough ever since. Its close and cloistered warmth in Summer, with the walls themselves seeming to sweat. Its cold stone and frigid floors in Winter — the moaning howling wind in the doorway, beyond the guest-glyph. The sound of windchimes carved in wood and bone, out on the walkway of our row in the Grey Quarter gorgeside._

_Of the mer eight warrens down who sold good preshta-lo: cabbage and radishes, fermented with redspice and mute-pepper, ladled from his one huge stoneware urn into smaller earthen jars for a penny._

_Of my mother’s panbreads. Both kinds: soft and puffy and oily-sweet; and stiff and smoky-blackened in patches like an alleycat’s piebald coat. Of the sharp-spiced pickles she made and stored by our hearth. And of the box my father kept his sword in, locked up tight with the stories he never tells._

_“You tried,” Kjeld said, leaning in close, cutting into my remembering. “It’s a thing that takes some doing — talking at your captor like you’ve still got a leg to stand on, and pride left to stand with. Funny how drink can make things harder and easier, both at once.” He glanced thoughtful over at Ieva and Kitlun, talking in an eager hush. “Mark me, Sim. Whatever our Riftwoman’s saying to theirs – whatever she’s getting us into –…”_

_He tailed off into silence. I reckon he was thinking of home, just as I was. Except to him, home was a person._

_In the morning we were granted our horses again. Rosk was given a new pony – an ill-tempered little brown-and-cream pony, that had outlived one of the outriders who had chased us – and I was given back the rust-red mare I rode before. My mantle and rope were still strapped to its back. Good — I don’t think Siska would ever forgive me losing either of the presents she gave me._

_Mist pooled in the valley we’d pulled ourselves from, the night before. The sun keened brittle and sidelong across the mountains that marked the southern horizon, and sprawled lazy or weak along the plains to the east, ruptured by ridges and valleys, then flat. I ate two apricots from my gathersack, and took the time to spell myself clean, mantra my hurts quiet._

_“We are agreed,” Kitlun announced, standing high in her stirrups over us all. “You will follow us. You will help.” She did nothing I could see to her silvery-coated pony – no nudge of the knee or tug of the reins – but it ambled broadside to mine as I saddled up, and she looked at me with hard-smiling eyes, an unsmiling mouth. “You were eager to make promises yesterday, Velothi. Let us see how well you like yoking your hopes to ours. Ride with us. Avenge my clan. And you have my word, Kitlun Broken-Thorn will ride for the Stormcloaks.”_

_“I have a name,” I grumbled. But she had turned her back on me, and was riding amongst her own warriors. “Simra Hishkari,” I called after her, then fell just to muttering. “My name is Simra Hishkari…”_

_And I wondered why she took me straightways for an Ashlander. And we rode two abreast, along the outside edge of the mountains’ roots. Captives no longer, except in the sense that we had no choice but to follow._


	40. Chapter 40

 

 

“Tell her from me,” said Kjeld. “Tell the Riftmare I’ve got questions. Doubts. By all the gods, do I have doubts. But for a start, tell her I’d like to ask about her plan. Heeding the fact that we’re hunting down and planning to butcher a clan for her – not a rabble of outriders or raiders, but a whole blasted clan, numbers swelled from having swallowed all but all of hers, mind – I’d like to think she at least has a plan!”

He rode alongside Ieva. Eyes downfixed on his pony’s withers, shoulders lax in a slouch, he talked and talked. He didn’t look at Ieva, but meant her to hear every word.

“The Riftmare speaks your tongue, Nord.” Kitlun said in a far-carrying voice.

She twisted at the waist as she spoke, eyeing Kjeld over the tackle and backmost horn of her tall saddle. Embossed leather, stitched with dotwork patterns: leaves, clouds, birds on the wing, all rendered in studs of glinting metal. They spread as if growing, flying, from the saddle to her quiver, slung on cant at her lower back. Pretty things, fine things, fitting for a clanlord. But the holster at her side and the bow within were subtle and simple.

“I understand it too,” Kitlun carried on. “Whether you bray or whisper, I understand.”

The arrows in her quiver were kept distinct by a kind of leatherbraid tongue. Long heavy war-arrows bundled lowermost, shorter lighter deer-killers up above. Simra glanced up from her saddle and found her face. She wore a withering look. Cattish in the sleepy narrow of her eyes, and in her utter confidence that whatever was worth knowing, she knew it best.

Simra reached to his side, felt for the neck of his waterskin. He’d reckoned it pretty in its way, back when Siska had first given it to him. The same for the hide-and-fleece mantle. But now the skin was simple and battered, and the mantle was set to task as a saddlecloth. Coarse and stupid.

He took a drink. The water had been sweetish and clear, taken straight from the stream they’d camped by that morning. Now it was leathern, stale. Simra’s eyes went down again. A green pang of envy moved through him. Kitlun’s saddlebags were as fine as the saddle itself, heavy with things he knew better than to think about. For all she’d lost everything, she was still a rich Nord – a clanlord’s daughter – like any of the others in Windhelm. So why had she called Kjeld ‘Nord’, like she was anything but?

“The Weeping-Clouds have a hall,” said Andral, riding beside Kitlun. The same skullish-faced grey-haired Riftman Simra had spoke to on their first night amongst the Broken-Thorns. Kitlun’s second, so far as he could tell. “Like ours was once. Up in the hills and flanked thick with woods. A good place to winter. If the cold months were coming, might be we could wait on them there.”

“It’s Second Seed,” Kjeld said bitterly. “That’s a long, long wait.”

Simra kissed his teeth loudly, and slouched on the back of his mare. He’d seen the Riftfolk sleep in their saddles, sound as anything, but to him every moment on horseback was still trying. No chance for a moment’s rest till his feet were on the ground once more.

“But Kjeld is right, hey?” Mere cut in from behind Simra. “Try and tell us he’s not. We’ve no chance against those numbers in a fair fight on open ground.”

“And the Rift ain’t got a thing besides open ground,” muttered Moridene. Riding beside Simra, she spoke low enough that only he heard. “Even a sea’s got peaks and troughs in shit weather. But this..?”

“Then we need eveners of odds,” said Kitlun. “An ambush, a killing ground. A way to strike first against a softer enemy.”

“Spoken like a Kreathing,” Kjeld sneered. “Moment you have a way to hit them like that, just you let us all know, hey? Hope we all live long enough for you to have a good deep think on that…”

Simra saw something change in the way Kitlun sat. A sudden stiffness in the line of her shoulders, a straightening in her back, like an animal making itself bigger to face a threat. She didn’t look round. Following her, they travelled on.

 

_Lowland foothills. The outermost hems of these mountains. The riding is worse than normal from the footing here. Like the bones of my arse and the bones of my horse are both conspiring against me. No meat left on me that’s not tender now with bruises. But no new scratches or cuts to speak of. The ones I got from the briar-thicket have closed over and do nothing worse than itch now. I’d like to reckon my healing magic’s responsible, but perhaps I’m just good at taking a kicking. (And a beating, a grazing, a starving. Doesn’t bear thinking how I’d fare against arrows, spears, and blades.)_

_Day and night, the Jeralls rise up on our righthand. Heaths and such, tumbling down on the left. Then a flat and featureless haze that, on a clear enough midday, I can make out to be the plains. They still look and feel like the Rift. This place – stunted twists of woodland, gulleys and valleys full of mist and mud – I’m less sure about. But Kitlun says places like this are where most of the Riftfolk who still live in half-settled clans spend their Winters. Where there’s timber for fuel and building. Stone too. Shelter from the wind, and nooks that beasts retreat into for waiting out the cold — so, furs and meat as well._

_If these are the Jeralls, I asked Moridene whether they felt like home. Even slightly?_

_Not hardly, she answered, by the campfire come evening. Puffing her long-stemmed pipe as she talked, busying her hands with a small knife and a scrap of wood. This place, she said, is too big and too small. Too much empty air and not enough full. The mountains climb too gradual, not doing much to let you know they’re anything other than hills except that they go on and on past the mark where mist hides them. Her Jeralls are more honest about that. Abrupt and sheer cliff-faces, jagged stone, valleys and coves cleaved through by white rivers. Proper forest, thickgrown and deep. Pine and birch – like here, she admitted – but honey locust too, and poplar. (Trees I’d never heard of. At least now I can recognise the first two.)_

_And the people here? The people here, she said, would get called godless back home._

_I asked if her people were very particular about the Eight, the Nine, whichever. I’d heard that Cyrods generally are._

_But she said no, and chewed the syllable a little in a way that made it more like a ‘maybe’ or a ‘saying that doesn’t quite cover it’. Not those gods. Just the gods, she said. The bigger ones, and the little ones of the land that you’ve got to keep on your side or just keep well away if you know what’s good for you. Oaklings and Wanders and Laurels and such. The ancestors that you’ve got to make sure get the notice they deserve. The Riftfolk don’t sing nearly enough, for one thing…_

_A silence before she asked me about my people. And I said that, really, I had no clue. No solid truths. Unless she meant Windhelm which, she said, she didn’t. The people there haven’t got culture worth the telling, she said. And the conversation was over after that._

_And then, this morning, we turned our backs on the mountains and started to travel downhill._

 

That day’s ride had been the worst since the chase, and much slower. A winding careful path, edging round low jawbone rows of rock, jutting from the softer heathdirt, then scrambling on to the next longsloping limb of the way down. Leaning back all the while just for the sake of staying close to upright, Simra’s stomach and hips ached fiercely. They’d since dismounted, stopped for the night, but the murmuring pain hadn’t.

But they reached the plains before halting. The rise of the foothills still loomed up close enough to see, but on every other side, the flat grasslands spread on and outward. Slowly the night chewed up the distance and swallowed it down. The grasslands grew smaller, tightening round them. Steppe then plain, then field then meadow, till the whole Rift had shrunk to the light of their campfire and the pinpoint stitching of stars overhead.

“Don’t know that we should be risking fires anymore,” Kjeld said, even as he held out his strip-wrapped hands out to the flames. “Not out here. Anyone might see it from leagues off.”

“Anyone riding blind through the night,” said Andral, with a mouth full of chewing. “A Riftman would not risk that. Not by plain or mountain.” He pointed at Kjeld with a gnawed-over bone.

“If that’s meant to put me at ease…” muttered Kjeld, then turned to Simra. “Next fire you light, dig a pit for it. Put it under everyone else’s horizon. Muffle the glow, even if only a little.”

But Simra had already finished his slim share of dinner, and cleaned his fingers carefully, before opening the pages of his journal and starting to write.

 

_No mezga tonight. Not cold enough, so reckon the Riftfolk. Easy for them to say in their fine riding-coats. They reach inside and bring out small boxes, pinch spice from them onto their food as they eat. But they don’t share, and us strangers have our meat tasting only of meat._

_Marmot. A fat one, but still tough from the short impatient roast it was given in its own hide, gutted body full of hot rocks to cook it inside and out. Clever. And the flavour at least was good. Like darker riper hare, with some sizzling fat to its belly and haunches. Even so, I miss parsnips and turnips, dirt-yams of the kind that’ll grow in the Quarter. Peshta-lo or even straight cabbage. Green things. Panbreads, rice, grains._

_It’s not yet Midyear but getting near enough. And by the time the sun gets to rising in the Apprentice, my contract will be over. And what are the odds we’ll be done with all this and back with the Vahn by then? Shit all, so far as I can see. Nearly a sixmonth with the company, and only a soreworn arse to show for it. And a place on a suicide mission. And a sword, a scabbard, a rust-red jacket. A long and boring story. And not a penny more than that._

_For all we know, perhaps it’s worth the wondering: will there even be a Vahn to return to, by the time we get round to returning? War can change things quick, I suppose…_

 

“I’ve been thinking,” said Moridene. She’d heaped herself on the fire’s far side, chewing on the stem of her pipe.

“Have a care with that,” snorted Mere. “Too many thoughts and there won’t be room in your head for all that smoke.”

“You have a fuckin’ care,” she snapped. “Else there won’t be room in your skull for talk with all the fists I’ll have gone and put in there!”

Simra snorted, then started to laugh. Side-aching ceaseless giggles that made his jaw and belly hurt and put his nose in danger of running. He stifled his mouth into the shoulder of his mantle – shucked off his mare for now, but still smelling of the beast – and still couldn’t hide the heaving of his breath.

Mere laughed too, until Moridene launched an idle seated kick at him. Then he was on his back, wheezing instead, but still to the tempo of his laughter.

“Son of a—…” she growled. “Just you shitkickers listen up for just one second. An evener of odds, you said. A place and time to hit ‘em where they’re soft? Way I see it, ain’t enough to just wait for the chance. We’d be waiting for-fuckin’-ever. If we can’t wait till we find the Weeping-Clouds belly up then, well, we’ve gotta turn them over.”

Moridene was grinning. A wicked grin made worse by the firelight. Around the fire, everyone else was silent. Grave. The laughter had all died out. She whipped her gaze about the circle of them, and her grin turned quick to a despairing glare.

“The hall!” she groaned. “We drive ‘em to their hall, like you said, and we do it there! Kick the living shit out of them!”

“Drive them?” echoed Rosk.

“Make it so nowhere else seems safe,” Moridene crowed. “The plains, the hills, nowhere! Damn right we can’t win a fair fight but that don’t mean we can’t put some hurt on them! Just a few of us, day by day. Pick off stragglers. Rustle their herds.”

“Small skirmishes,” said Kitlun, warming to the thought. “Raid after raid till they fear and hurt day and night. Like the world has turned their sins back on them.”

“Take it from someone who knows,” said Kjeld, “but small skirmishes are risky. Dozens of them? That’s a dozen risks. We don’t have the numbers to waste.”

“Nor do we have a place among us for cowards, Nord.” Kitlun turned a cold look on him.

“Or any other options,” said Ieva, softer.

“No,” said Simra. He’d been thinking. Remembering. Just now, something had fallen into place. “There’s another option. Other options, maybe. I think—…” His tongue flicked agitated over his teeth. He raised a hand to scratch fretful at an eyebrow, eyes screwed tight.

“Well?”

“Shut up! Shut your fucking faces all of you for a fucking second didn’t I just say I’m thinking? I can’t—…can’t think with—…Right. Kitlun,” Simra said. “I’ve been thinking about your story, right? Your father and brother. They brought them back to your hall, right? To be buried?”

“Not buried. Given to the sky, first. But yes.”

“Right. Right right. And that’s what happens with your folk? While you’re alive you travel round, but when you’re dead you’re put to rest in one place? Taken there. The whole clan, if the death’s a big enough deal?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got—…” Simra stopped, gave a small-humming groan in the back of his throat, but his gritted teeth wouldn’t let it sound out loud. He rubbed his brow, then opened his eyes. Looking into the fire, they were wide and brightly amber — his father’s eyes and keen wolfish face. “It’s not a plan. But it’s a thing. Something. Listen…”

 


	41. Chapter 41

 

 

_We split. Two uneven halves. One group for each part of my plan._

_One to ride out in search of Csengir and his Weeping-Clouds. Kjeld and Moridene, Rosk and Mere, Kitlun and all but one of her best riders. Our fighters, trackers, and most of our horses. They needed to make good time — fast on the chase or in flight, they’d need spares to ride. They sped out across the plains, beginning their hunt._

_I stayed with the others. The leftovers. Me and the walking wounded, Ieva to give us farther-sighted eyes, and Andral to act as Kitlun’s hand amongst us. Through him, her breath on our neck — her eyes at our backs, making sure we don’t swerve from purpose._

_But this is not like the Vahn all over again. The battle on the plains, where the fighters went to fight, and I went off to mind camp: light fires, stir pots, cut bandages. I might begrudge my part in things if it weren’t my plan in the first case. But it is. And I don’t. Even as we trudged eastward along the plains, and up into another snarling juncture of the Jeralls. At least there’s no-one to blame but me._

 

Around the fire sat a circle of strangers. Even Ieva he’d travelled with a month or so but didn’t truly know. It was only her face and voice that were familiar. More than he could say for the others. Four hard-faced Riftfolk – men and women – with names he found hard to pronounce and hardly worth remembering, and Andral, who spoke for them.

“My riders don’t like it,” muttered Andral in a thick Tamrielic trade-tongue. “What you suggest is—”

“Against your customs?” Simra leapt up from his fireside crouch and started to pace. For days he’d been filled with a kind of energy, making his thoughts and temper quicker than ever. Like teetering constant on the edge of something. “Right, right. Got that the first six times you said so.”

“They won’t do it. No man or woman among them fears battle. But the anger of the gods…”

“That’s why I’m not forcing any of them to fucking do it!” Simra snapped, dragging a stiff-fingered hand through his hair, tugging a palmful out of its messy tie-back. A lock fell into his eyes. Others tickled against his cheek. A silence fell. Chewing his lower lip, he looked into the heart of their campfire till the rest of the world darkened to black-and-blue nothing. “Doesn’t change the fact someone’s got to though, does it? Does it?” Simra repeated. “Unless any of you’ve got another better plan.”

Andral shook his head. With Simra’s eyes still tuning themselves to something beyond flames, the Riftman’s face was more skullish than ever. Oceans of shadow and bleak swathes of stretched skin. Nearly nothing to see except shade where there ought to have been eyes.

“The laws you want to break are old,” said Andral. Something made him look down, away from Simra’s stare. The words he spoke were weak.

“Csengir broke them, didn’t he? Have your gods sent thunder to strike him down? Nah. Just us. And I reckon we’ve sent ourselves…D’you not see something right in that? In this? Like a—…like a symmetry? Get him back the way he got you. Poet’s justice.”

The Riftfolk spoke amongst themselves, murmuring and clattering their consonants, nodding as they talked in their own tongue.

Simra blinked hard. Nothing was getting done. No progress, nothing achieved, and time was slipping by uncaring. There was a panic in that, or the strange grey borders of one. Like a moth in a jar, trapped in motion, mad with the want to escape. Do something. For fear of the nothing, just do. It was a rising writhing frustration that broke into anger, and a roar that came over his thoughts.

“I’ll fucking do it,” Simra heard himself say. “They’re not my customs. Not my land or my laws or my gods. Just hope to fuck they’re not looking.”

 

_I’d begrudge it and hate it if it weren’t my plan. I’d run, probably. And I don’t know what’s stopping me now. Pride maybe. Things to prove, but not to them. They called me brave and I can’t tell which of us believed it less._

_I had them all turn out their pockets and saddlebags, and set the biggest panniers they had on the back of my red-brown mare. Whatever trinkets I reckoned would help, I heaped into her packs. I had the smallest among them strip the charcoal Broken-Thorn hem off her riding-coat, and had another take the leatherbraid bridle from his horse. I wore the former, my mare the latter._

_And this morning I went on alone, up and into the mountains, weaving lies to tell with every step I took._

 

To Simra, far-off and squinting across the darkening distance, it seemed perched and improbable amongst the rock and clamber of the mountainside. Like a mountain-goat or a deep-rooted weed. Part of the landscape. It was set into a corner amongst the steep crags of the mountain’s feet, backed by sheer blank-faced rises of stone, steel-grey and tall. A thin braid of smoke went up wind-crooked, from the roof of the Weeping Clouds’ hall.

The rocky corner, the hall, the walls around it slipped into shadow one by one. The sun slid westward. Simra plodded closer as it started to set. He worried about the smoke. Better to find the place empty — a stupid thing to hope for, but he’d hoped all the same.

He’d left the others behind and waiting. Simra led his mare on foot, fingers tangled in her new bridle. There was only a skinny meander of a path to follow, the width of two riders perhaps, going side by side. But for him it was more than enough.

In bowshot of the wooden walls, the hillside changed. A ragged waste of broken and difficult ground spread across the slope. Thicketed hedgerows of thorns, stunted shrubbery, jagged drystone fences banked up between sudden ditches and rain-swollen pitfalls. The slim path twisted through, winding awkwardly. Past low cairns, and spindly deadwood branches, driven into the ground and tied with ragged streamers of cloth. They were all that marked the way.

Simra tried to figure out why someone would scar their land like this. Ruined ground would ruin a cavalry charge, slow an advance on foot maybe. The earth in the ditches was newish-turned, the sides stark and clear-cut. New changes, he reckoned, to put someone’s new-grown suspicions at ease.

The sun dipped behind the mountain’s long-ranging curve. Simra called a magelight. Calves burning, footsore and weary, it was full-dark before he reached the walls.

They were only a little over man-high, but looked thick and sturdy. Thin young treetrunks driven into the earth to form a palisade, one row upright, the other sharp-angled out. A screen of wooden wattling tangled between the stakes. It slanted back into the dark, further than Simra could see, each wall on the diagonal. A lattice gate stood at the corner where the two palisades met. Like the edges of an arrow come to a point.

A torch glowered down at him from the gatehouse. Simra remembered Vernimwood. Fleeing through the night and hammering against the town’s wickerwork doors, screaming for someone to open up. A scrap of that terror came back like an echo even now, nearly two years later.

“Who goes?” A voice from the gatehouse. The words were in Riftspeak, but plain enough that Simra understood.

“A trader,” Simra called back in Skyrim’s Tamrielic. “Alone and hoping you’ll give an eye to my wares. A seat for my arse and fire to warm my bones? Or have the clans here forgotten what it means to give guest-rights?”

The guard followed Simra into a coarse-accented Tamrielic: “Armed, are you?”

“Is a blunt old sword and a bag of arrowheads ‘armed’?”

Silence.

“You’ll give us the sword,” called the guard eventually. “A keepsake till you’re on your way.”

Simra bristled, shoulders tensing beneath his mantle. “If you’ll sharp it for me in the meantime, reckon I’ll give it to you gladly.” He forced a wry smile into his voice, hoping for laughter. None came.

“Which are you? Trader or beggar? Off with you, wanderer. Wander back the way you came.”

Cold worry broke out across the back of Simra’s neck. It furrowed his brow, threatening panic as the breath pulled and knotted in his chest.

“And what about the news I have for Csengir of the Weeping-Clouds?” he shouted, trying to make it sound like a winning card kept up his sleeve. Not a desperate final gambit.

“What about it? The clanlord’s with his people. On the plains, where he ought to be.”

“What? And you’ve no way to get word to him?” Simra kissed his teeth noisily. “Mark me, he’ll want to hear this. When news of your enemies comes your way, you don’t just turn it back into the night.”

Another pause. This one stretched the longest yet. Simra could hear the blood in his ears, ringing a warning. But the gates juddered with the sound of someone adjusting a bar. Simra’s hands went to his sash, fumbling to loose the rope that tied on his sword, and daring to hope. One gate swung inward.

A gristly-featured Riftman stood in the brief gap that opened. One hand held up a knot of pine, pitch-dipped and lit for a torch. The other held a slim wicked pick of an axe partway up its haft. A recurved bow and a dozen long man-killing arrows were quivered at his waist.

“What’s the news?” he said, eyeing Simra wary through the open gate.

Simra knew that look well enough. The guard was trying to make something of him and coming up with only questions. The pieces were there and nearly clear. Horse with heavy-bulging saddlebags. Dark-brown Riftman riding-coat worn open over a rust-red aketon. No colour or broidery to the coat’s knee-length hem. A clanless wanderer then. A no-one from nowhere, or so Simra hoped. But more likely the guard was gazing over Simra’s eyes and skin – the rite-marks his mother had cut slight into his face – and asking himself questions Simra didn’t want to answer.

“It has to do with Kitlun Broken-Thorn,” said Simra, holding out his sword hilt-first.

“And what do you want for it, Velothi?”

Simra tried not to grimace. “To anyone who’ll look over my wares,” he patted a saddlebag, and nearly sighed in relief as it gave a traderly clank. “Anyone who’ll maybe share their fire and supper? I’ll tell them that tale for nothing.”

With a grunt, the guard took his sword and led him inward. A bobbing magelight and a sputtering torch, together they lit their way across the darkened courtyard.

 


	42. Chapter 42

Simra set down the saddlebags with a dull and many-sided thud. Lumpen, they slouched and subsided, contents shifting on the hall floor. A cloud of fine dust curled lazy up from around them, misty in the firelight.

He’d carried the bags over his shoulders like a milkmaid’s yoke, biting into him as he climbed the stairs up to the hall. Gritting his teeth, bearing up against the pain; sharp on his skin, seeping down through the muscle — that was nothing new. The difficulty was in keeping himself from cursing blind every step of the way. He fought to keep his trader-mask intact. Smiling like an idiot, as if the hope of a sale and warm hearth made the burden into one he was happy to bear.

Breathing sharp through his nose, Simra straightened the set of his lips from out of their grimace, and looked up from where the bags lay. Behind him the guard left, shouldering a way through the heavy beaded and broidered curtain that covered the hall’s tall triangular doorway. Back to his post probably, at the platforms by the gate. And Simra was left behind, amongst the huge and shifting shadows of the hall.

In front of him a firepit had been dug into the floor. Lined with soot-black stones, surrounded by pokers, skewers, arrays of pot-hooks and dripcatch pans, spits for roasting meat. It was round and deep and wide, but most of it was ancient cold ash. Only a weak little cookfire shuddered inside, hoarded up and into one of the pit’s edges. An old woman hunched there, bent over a black-iron pot. Simra caught scent of the steam from it. His lips curled and his stomach gurgled.

Rugs were strewn round the firepit. They were richly patterned but threadbare from use, dusty from disregard. From the pit’s farside they led off pathlike, reaching into the shadows at the hall’s rearmost wall. A three-faced screen of stretched embossed hides blocked Simra from seeing any further, about an armspan across on each side.

Instead he looked up. It had been too dark to tell, outside on the steps or in the courtyard, but the hall was broad and roughly circular. Not long and with a boatkeel ceiling, as a hall might be in Eastmarch. More like the tents of the Riftfolk, built large and made to last. Ribs of bent timber and a roof of stretched leather.

“Welcome, wanderer!” A hard female voice echoed across the firepit. She spoke the same coarse northern Tamrielic as her guard at the gate, but clearer, more fluent. “Csaba, third-daughter to Csengir Ironfold, lord of the Weeping-Cloud clan, welcomes you on her father’s behalf, and with the voice of her people.”

The old woman by the fire had hair near as white as Simra’s mother’s, and a face hidden by the bent of her work. But the woman who spoke had Rift-black hair, threaded with rock-salt grey. A flat face, sharp towards its chin, and narrow about the eyes, starkly formal. She had on a mask, Simra reckoned, just like him. Showing him only what she wanted him to see. Strong bearing, wide and solid stance, one hand at ease on the hilt of her sheathed sword: a straight Nordic blade by the look of it, but with a strange incurve to its grip. Simra felt the lack of his own keener than ever.

Simra bowed some, bending at his middle. “Your honour does you credit and me a great honour, Csaba.” His gaze fixed on the rugs that covered the floor. Stitched into the cloth, an antlered beast ran full-tilt, horns blending into curls of cloud overhead, hooves into coils of creepers below. Three arrows pierced its side: hard straight lines against a sea of fluid curves.

The woman gave a puff of laughter. “You mistake my meaning. I am not Csaba. I only speak for her.”

Simra flushed hot. Already a misstep. But no matter perhaps. It wasn’t like they’d taken him for a native in the first place. Nothing lost that he had ever had to lose.

She took two measured steps backward, and inclined her head, listening to something said behind the screen. “Mezga,” she barked, clapping her big hands together. A whip-limbed man somewhere in his middle-years scurried in from one side with a bowl. He slipped behind the screen, then to the speaker. She drank from it once before he hurried round, offering it to Simra.

He drank a shallow sip, knowing how strong the stuff could be. He’d need his wits about him. The flavour was different from the mezga Kiltun had given him, but not in ways he could place. The bowl went round again. Screen, speaker, Simra.

“We drink twice,” said the woman with the sword. “Once for our trust in you, host to guest. Once for your trust in us, as guest to your host. Now — sit.”

The echo of mezga on Simra’s tongue was bitter. Perhaps he ought by now to’ve felt some forepang of guilt. But none came. If this Nord was going to tell him ‘sit’ – like some trained hound – and look at him like a stray, he’d pay her the same regard. Csaba’s barking dog and not much more, he told himself. He sat cross-legged by his saddlebags.

It was simple to talk and pretend once he got started. That was always the way with lying. One untruth led to another. Each made the next come easier.

At first he lied about rain out on the steppe, and how the plains had turned to marsh and mud all along the Treva. How that was the way he’d come, weeks back, and how he’d had to cross by raft — he and his mare. But how he’d seen as he followed the river, that the rains had stripped away a whole riverbank’s worth of dirt, and uncovered nodes of amber beneath the soil.

The old woman didn’t speak, but served Simra a glass bowl of heavily-spiced stew, deeper in colour and flavour than anything he’d eaten since last he was home in the Grey Quarter. Springslaughtered lamb, whole radishes, sliced bell-peppers, braised in a thick sauce, sharp and vibrant with the Rift’s hot redspice. Groping for the words, Csaba’s speaker told him the meat was mostly hearts and shanks. Humble stuff, she said. But with soft half-white flattish bread to soak up the gravy, and seasonings that made his throat seize and burn, Simra felt a misplaced shudder of gratitude with every mouthful.

 

_After food and mezga, I went to my saddlebags and showed the wares I’d brought. Dried herbs and resins for healing. Cakes of soap, hastily scented with red ravelbyne. Needles of carved bone, and combs of antler. Three good whetstones. A bag of jangling arrowheads, and another of red-lacquered beads. The pewter hexagonal ring I’ve worn for months, sensing magic in it, but not knowing what kind or how to unlock it. Balls of waxy pungent incense. Buttons of real amber to back up the falsehoods I’d told about my journey here._

_In part, they were the things I’d got from Kitlun’s riders. Pretty things, but for the most part not essential to anything but my ruse. Things folk might use for currency, when coin is short or unwelcome. And for all I pushed and bartered, and bragged about the quality of every one of my wares, my breath caught and my lungs clenched every time the speaker took one of the trinkets behind the screen to show to Csaba. In truth, none of them were really for sale. I’d have been loathe to lose any of them._

_False goods and a stream of lies. Even Csaba and her guardian tired of them, I reckon. After that it was their turn to push. They asked for the news I brought, and I told them of Kitlun Broken-Thorn._

_That she was still alive, and mustering a ragged not-clan of clanless wanderers north of the Treva. That she was yet weak, and wise enough that she was not yet looking for revenge. Not till she’d gathered her strength. That she was encamped, dug in, and if Csengir sought her out, he could snuff out the threat she posed in one pinch._

_In all this, I only gave Csaba one grain of truth. My first name. In all good lies, there should be a glimpse of that, I reckon. Like mortar in a wall, or weft in the warp of a woven cloth._

 

Halfway through half of his plan, and the weight of it hung heavy on Simra. He set down his pen, blew dry the glossy trails of ink he’d scrawled across his journal’s pages, and glanced round the stables.

They’d housed him there alongside his horse, once his trader-act was done. Even leant back against his mare, and with her breathing slow and calm behind him, he hadn’t been able to sleep. She was happy enough to be bedded down on straw and reeds. But Simra felt the bare surround of skin on his left middlefinger, cold and strange and naked without the pewter ring to cover it. Csaba had only bought it for the sake of manners. Exchanged it for a shilling of silver and fivepence copper, in return for the news Simra had fed her. In a margin, he wrote down the change to his savings. Once, profits like that would have made Simra all too happy.

And now? No sword, no ring, and only the utmost frayed edges of a plan he’d crafted too quick and incautious. He wrote by magelight. As if the scatch of his pen might sound louder than his jangling nerves.

Simra’s stomach coiled, uneasy round the dinner he’d eaten. The mezga he’d drunk made him warm at first. But it had faded hours back, and left him cool, crick-jointed, not trusting his movements. He rose awkwardly and peered out beyond the stable’s thatched roof. Out into the courtyard and the sky above.

The first tinny scraps of dawn had begun to show in the East. A pale half-light whispered over all he could see. It showed the timbered bones that held up the hall, and the stone foundations, still huddled in shadow. The courtyard itself was a broad diamond of dust, reaching back into the sheer cliff-face. It was eerie in its emptiness, and the ground was dark with dew.

Shoulders knotting and grinding, Simra roused his mare, loaded on his saddlebags, and went out into the courtyard. A low mist still cling to the near distance, gathered round the palisade gates and the scaffolds built about them. He wasn’t sneaking, or even trying to be silent, but every stir and clinch of his boots on the ground set his ears ringing.

There was no morning birdsong here. Just the wind high overhead in the mountains, and the distant call and cry of things that rode it. Eagles? Hawks? Simra didn’t know.

He reached into his aketon and brought out his spearhead-knife. With clammy fingers he unwrapped the rags that covered it, and left them tied round its handle: the thin nook between blade and lugs that would take a spear-shaft if he had one. He hid it under the mare’s saddle, hand resting there as if to lean on her withers, calm her with a touch.

The dawn showed Simra a dim-lit figure, hunched over on one of the gatehouse platforms. He stopped, squinted at them, then called out:

“Piss-poor morning for it! Looks like rain, right?” No response. “I’d best be off before it strands me here. That hillside’d be murder when it’s mudslick, right?”

The guard shifted, turned, raised a hand to scratch under the tall peak of its hooded mantle. From under the hood, they were staring at Simra. He could see a stubbled jaw working, like winkling the last scraps of meat from between rabbit-bones.

“Trader?” they called down, in a butchered Tamrielic. A different guard from before, this one with a brace of short spears, fit either for fighting or throwing.

“Yes,” Simra called back.

The guard nodded curtly, left one spear on the scaffold, and laddered down to the ground.

“If you could get me my sword back and open the gate, I’ll be on my way.” Simra smiled weakly, eyeing the remaining spear.

The guard returned his gaze warily. “Sword,” he grunted after a moment, and herded Simra across the courtyard.

Along the wall, then between a scant few wicker pens of ducks and sheep, hutches of rabbits. A low slate-roofed building with a blackened chimney-stack nestled against the rockface after that. A smithy, foundry, kiln maybe.

“Stay,” said the guard, and went inside.

First the speaker, telling him to ‘sit’. Now this guard, treating Simra like a mutt, when he barely spoke the world’s language himself. Simra tried to hide the judder of disgust that went through him. He stayed, left hand hidden under his mare’s saddle. She made a fluttering noise from somewhere down inside her long neck. A nervous sound. Simra stroked her coat with the edge of his hidden thumb, the tips of his fingers. He remembered what Ieva had said, about how horses would mirror back whatever feelings you were fool enough to show them. She could scent his fear.

The guard came back, sword gripped by its sheathe in one hand, spear standing in the other. Simra took a jerky step forward, reached out for it with his right hand. The guard’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared. He’d seen something. How Simra’s left hand stayed guilty under the saddle.

In the same instant they both wrenched into action. Both spitting curses in their own tongues, both fumbling for their weapons.

An armspan or so between them still. The guard yanked back his arm, surged it forward, and the spear flew. Simra spat a calling word, fanned out his right hand’s fingers. A wave of hot wind and scowling sparks rushed out. The scent of burning hair. The spear tumbled in its flight, and the light shaft fell like a switch against against the red-brown mare’s flank. She shrieked and bolted, nearly pulling Simra’s arm clean from joint before he let go. The sheep by now were screaming too. And Simra’s left hand was empty.

Unbalanced a moment, but the guard had gone for the sword. He threw the scabbard. Simra flinched, staggering away on tugging instinct. No knife, sword turned against him. Terez had been right, she’d been right, she’d been right. The guard swung out with the blade. In his hand it flicked, nearly delicate, toward Simra’s chin. Simra gave ground – a lurching dodge – till he backed into a wicker fence.

Make space. Remember the Proving. He wove with both hands, dragging up any power that would come, then drove forward sure-rooted. Ground beneath his feet, air between his fingers, breath in his lungs. A snarling wave of smoking splintering dirt and sputtering flames followed him as he moved.

The guard’s backstep lasted only a moment. There was bark to Simra’s magic but not near enough bite to scare him. Arm and blade flicked out again, cleaving down at Simra’s shoulder.

Simra remembered the night by the docks. How close he’d needed to be. This terror was nearly the same. It gripped and made him mad. He didn’t dodge or retreat. Simra rushed into the oncoming sword, left arm raised like a shield.

There was pain then. It came like blindness. Left him feeling more than he could see. He felt the fingers of his right hand claw into the guard’s face. Palm clammy, pushed into hard jaw, soft throat. He felt their bodies mangling together. He spat words. A brief scalding messy calling that made his lungs burn and his teeth ache. There was fire at his fingertips, a feeling like sizzling fat. And nothing at all from his left hand side. A blazing boiling numbness.

Simra pushed. The guard fell howling backward, amidst the cries of animals round them. His face was a ruin and his neck was gouged, shrivelled, caved-in. A trenched and shining welt, riddled with smoulder and sparks.

A tunnel-eyed moment. Simra had his own sword in his burn-tender hand. He worked it like a saw against the guard’s neck, then collapsed onto his back.

The pain was real from there. He screamed through gritted teeth, lips peeled back wolfish as the scream became a sob. The pain throbbed and gnawed, all through the left of him.

“Stupid st—…stupid—…” he stammered. His lungs shuddered. Sick to his stomach, eyes gummed shut with holding back the sting of tears, Simra made himself look. His arm crumpled limp against his body, pulled in like a bird’s broken wing. But it was still whole, so far as he could tell. He tried to move his fingers. Nothing. Only another searing twitch of pain that sent him giggling, hysterical. “Arm’s still on…hand’s still fucking on…fuckers didn’t—..! Knewitknewitknewit!”

He was on his feet. Another clench-toothed scream as his arm flopped down, loose with its own weight. Something was grinding inside. But there was too much noise to waste time now, and a job not yet done.

Simra broke into a lurching run towards the gate. Once it was open, things blurred.

Andral had been waiting. Now he came. With Ieva, with his riders, with weapons drawn.

Simra stayed. Slumped by the gate, left arm cradled close, he tried to remember the sounds of the mantra that Clovis had taught him. They wouldn’t come. His lips wouldn’t make the shapes. Just whimpers and curses, muttering on till his mouth was dry and his throat was raw.

Blood welled and dried in the sleeve of his aketon.

Screams echoed throughout the courtyard, and over from the hall. Not just animals now.


	43. Chapter 43

Up and along from the diamond-shaped nook where the hall stood, a path clambered across the rockface and onto the mountainside. Steps hewn rough from the grey-black stone – step after step – then coarse ground, sparse weeds and heathers, the occasional tall defiance of a straightbacked pine-tree. Simra followed the path, trudging and cursing.

His hair had grown wild. Longer in only the most awkward places, and the wind had licked strand upon strand from the tufty little tie-back that kept it tame. It tickled at his brow and cheeks, caught round his eyelids when he blinked. Like cobwebs – walking through cobwebs – and probably the same colour too.

His left arm hung outside his aketon. Not worth the risk of bending it just to get it through the sleeve. Swathed up in a sling of cloth torn from a Weeping-Cloud riding coat, splinted straight, Simra held it close to his chest. Not even close to healed, it was all but useless, and painful in a grinding sort of way.

The wind up here was cold. Even behind his lips, Simra’s teeth had started to hurt. His bones too. The tips of his ears stung mad, but inside them was worse. A slow hollow howler of an ache, in rhythm to the gusting breeze.

He straggled along the mountainside till it launched out, jutting some into the empty air and out over the hillside below. A single half-dead birch grew spindly up from the outcrop. Like lines of thread, stitching this ledge to the mountain itself, its roots twisted and broke up the ground. The branches were leafless but not bare. Flutters of cloth were tied to each limb, in strips of white and blue, yellow and red. A big iron bell hung amongst them, dark and obtrusive. Beside it, a hammer strung onto a leather band shared the same branch.

Ieva sat with her back to the treetrunk, looking out into the beyond.

Simra coughed, announcing himself. “You’ve been up here a while.” A night and most of a day, in the cold and the wind, just watching. “Brought you something to eat, if you want?” He fished a cloth package out of his satchel, difficult with one good hand, and moved over to where Ieva sat motionless.

The wind twitched in her hair and made patterns in the matted fur of her coat. She was too still. Draped with dark possibilities. Simra nearly panicked, wanted to shake her, wake her up. He swallowed hard. And instead he found himself wishing he had a mirror, for the hundredth time these last few months — something to hold up to her face and check for breath. But he’d seen her like this before: eyes closed and mind elsewhere. This was no different.

Lowering himself one-armed, hissing, muttering, clumsy, Simra came to a rest. He sat with her, satchel and cloth package cradled in his lap. And he waited, looking out across the hillside and beyond.

The ranks and stripes of trenches dug there. The cairns and the bristling hedges. A valley struck through the highlands, with a heavy-bellied river rushing out along its bottom. And then a misty distance he reckoned to be the plains of the Rift. So quiet and empty that he saw the crow coming long before it settled down on the branches above Ieva’s head. She opened her eyes.

“A day and a night as the crow flies,” she said slow and groggy. “I searched as far as I could. Out to the Treva. A little further…”

“Find them?” Simra asked.

“No. Not a single black souled thing in all that way.”

“Oh.” Simra paused, chewed at the inside of his lip, sighed through his nose. The wind moaned all round them. “Brought you something to eat,” he repeated eventually, opening out the cloth packet and handing it to her. A flat stone-baked fold of bread, wrapped pouchlike around a few spiced and peppered scraps of mutton, a few crisp pieces of sharp pickled vegetables.

She took the food and began to eat, wordless but not silent as she wolfed it down. Simra could hear her chewing, swallowing, breathing eagerly, like a starved dog at scraps thrown out from a cornerclub kitchen.

“D’you think they’re taking too long?” he asked, hunkering up his legs, setting his chin down on one knee.

“How long would it take you?” Ieva said between mouthfuls. “To kill off someone like that? Protected. Someone dear enough to the clan. And to make it back here after?”

“Depends…I see your point though.”

A shudder went through him, ending painful at the fractured bone in his forearm. He worried for Kjeld and Moridene. Staring at the horizon, he willed something to change. He longed for something solid against the sealike uncertainty of the plain. Riders. But nothing came.

“Go on.” Simra shot Ieva a pointed glance. Her face had more hollows than ever, sallow in places and bruise-dark in others. “Get some rest. The magic’ll drain you dry otherwise. I know how that can be…”

Ieva didn’t look at him, but the crow was staring, and Simra knew that was near enough the same thing.

“Go on,” he urged. “I’ll keep watch a while. It’s about all I’m good for now. Least I’ve still got both eyes.”

Ieva rose. He heard her joints click with disuse. “You’ve still got both arms,” she pointed out.

Simra didn’t laugh. He heard Ieva leave, footsteps scratching a path back down to the courtyard. And then no sound but the wind. He began to mutter under his breath. A low monotone, rolling by hard-remembered habit. Clovis’ mantra, to soothe the ache in his left arm.

 

_I tell the scene over in my mind till it makes sense. Till it seems something other than stupid. And by turning it over and over like that, the memory’s gotten all too clear._

_We’re fenced in. Limited space for the two of us, finite fire left in me. I can ward him off with it, but he and I know it can’t last forever. I try to make space, but even then the edge is on his side. He has my sword. When he comes at me I can’t retreat any further._

_But I wonder if maybe this is a kind of fighting I know better than him. Alley scrapping, undisciplined and desperate. And I’ve known for a long time that sometimes you’ve got to trade something for your victory. Proportionate exchange._

_He swings down. I do the only thing I can. Step in, catch the blade where it’s moving slowest, near to the hilt, turning it aside with a swiping arm. And through the pain I feel our bodies stumble together, grappling and groping. I reach for his neck, his face, clawing. Another dazzling snap of pain — he slams a fist into the back of my ribcage. But the sword is dealt with. My face crushed against his riding coat collar, every breath full of the scent of him. I snarl words and the fire hears my call. Close as we are, it has bite aplenty._

_The stench was greasy, sharp and awful. But kill or be killed is no choice at all. And what’s done is done. Not worth regretting._

_Thanks be that my hosts didn’t take me at my word. Didn’t sharpen my sword for me like I joked that they ought to. The edge was nearly blunt. The blow itself was half-hearted, complacent, with the kill seeming such a sure thing. Any different, and I might’ve never used my left hand again._

_As things stand, it hurts. It frayed at the cloth of my aketon’s sleeve, but the fabric took the worst of the cut. It needs stitching, but my skin’s only bruised. The blow turned blunt, broke something. I can’t turn my wrist, but don’t reckon that’s a forever thing. And between his fate and mine, I know which I’d pick._

 

Simra looked at Andral. Slouched beside the hall’s firepit, leant on one elbow, he was at rest and almost sleeping. But Simra remembered the night he’d opened the gates for him. For a moment he saw him, spattered, streaked, smeared with blood again. Axe broken off at the handle, its head gripped in his fist as he struck down with it, punched with it, falling on one of the old retainers in the hall — pinning and mauling like a wolf. Simra couldn’t unsee that, and couldn’t see Andral any other way.

There was new straw on the hall’s floor, but the blood beneath them remained. It stained the rugs in places, hiding the patterns. Simra wondered how much they might’ve been worth once. How close were they to worthless now?

Only Csaba was left untouched by the carnage. She sat stiffbacked and still, utterly silent by the fire. The screen that hid her was gone, broken up for firewood. Her speaker was dead. And now she was voiceless, motionless and mask-faced. She did nothing but sit, glassy-eyed and staring. Out of all their voices she seemed only to hear Ieva’s, and it fell to her to remind Csaba to eat and drink, bathe and sleep.

She couldn’t have been much more than half Simra’s age. Well-fed, round-faced, with glossy black hair. But still a child. She’d seen her world torn apart around her. No wonder she’d retreated from it, into herself.

Simra didn’t like looking at her either. Ieva had told him Riftwomen went screened or veiled from anyone outside their clan until they were of marrying age. Looking felt like a transgression. So far as the Riftfolk were concerned, he’d transgressed enough for a lifetime already. Csaba still wore his ring to prove it.

He got up and staggered over to the edge of the hall. Past splintered furniture, broken bowls and bottles of glazed clay, and over to the casks of mezga. He refilled his drinking-bowl, angled it up to his mouth, took a long draught. It helped with the pain in his arm. It let him lie to himself, about his thoughts and doubts and fears — that they were the drink, not him. But it still burnt his throat on the way down, unsettling his stomach.

 

_I dreamt I saw my mother and our hearth. The whole dream was darkness, and she and her hearthfire were the only light. A glowing hole in the blackness, like I was looking at them through an open doorway. I stumbled to the threshold, fell, got up, fell. My knees and hands were grazed when I arrived._

_I asked if I could come in. I was cold. At first she didn’t hear me, but I looked down and saw the guest glyph in the doorway. And I knew, like you can only know in dreams, that it would ward against me — hurt me. I couldn’t cross._

_I asked again, growing colder and colder out in the black of the dream. She looked up, looked into my eyes, and shook her head._

_I woke sick with hunger and too afraid to move. Cold in my fingers and cold in my bones, trapped in the smoky dark of the hall we all sleep in. Knowing. That I’ve made bad choices. That I’ve done bad things._

_That night one of Andral’s riders died in his sleep. And maybe I was the only awake for his passing. And even if I could never have done anything to help him, I could’ve been there if I’d known. Instead we all found him at dawn. Cold and reeking of the rot that had got into one of his wounds and burnt through him like a fever._

_He took a sword to the gut, helping to take down Csaba’s speaker. I hear she fought well. Died well, if there’s such a thing. You couldn’t say the same for him._

_This morning they wrapped him in one of the rugs, slung him over the back of a horse, and walked him up the mountain path. I didn’t follow. What were the words Kitlun used for how the Riftfolk deal with their dead?_

_Given to the sky._

_The prettiest way I ever heard of saying pecked to pieces by crows and buzzards._


	44. Chapter 44

They had lost riders too. They had more horses spare now than when they’d started. Coming back through a heavy mist of skinny rain, there was no triumph in their return.

Two pots steamed on the fire. In one, a daytime stew of gristly marrowbones and roots, meagerness masked by hot redspice and sour vinegar. The other seethed with heady fumes. Simra had seen half a dozen bowls of mezga go in, then twice as much water, then herbs and dried spicebarks. Halfmoons of bread darkened, baking on the hearthstones round the firepit.

A small bird had trapped itself in the hall. It twittered and flapped amongst the rafters, trying to find a way out but never straying towards the chimney, scared of the smoke. Bird and fire – splitting wood and glowering turf – those were the only sounds.

Kitlun sat cross-legged and straight-backed, staring ahead of her. But her eyes were glassy and flat, her face corpse-grey and drawn. That was something they all had in common — all the ones who had ridden out with her and come back now fewer in number.

Moridene was slumped in a tangle of her own limbs, like a doll dropped to the floor and left as it fell. Her hair was unwashed, a thicket of knots and tangles. Her eyes darted narrow and reddish, searching into every shadowed corner of the hall, like each might hold a threat.

Kjeld stood and stared towards the door. He paced from one side of the fire to the other, paced back again. Every movement was listless and drained of lustre. There was a drag to his left leg that hadn’t been there when last Simra had seen him. Kjeld had grown old since the pass in the mountainside, where he and Siska and Vesh herded goats in the hinterland between Eastmarch and Morrowind. But perhaps so had Simra. Older, at the very least.

Head bowed, Andral went to the pots, ladled each a bowl of stew and a bowl of the spiced and watered mezga. Simra fumbled with his share. First he drank the juices from the stew, set down the bowl. Then drained half the mezga. He wiped his fingers clean and plucked up the vegetables from the stew right-handed, and took each shard and break of bone to suck away the clings of meat and stores of marrow. As he went back to the mezga, Kitlun spoke:

“The finding was not hard. We had good trackers and Csengir has grown incautious in his pride. A large clan, following obvious routes across the plains. His herds and flocks left clear trails…”

She fell quiet once more. Everyone shared a baited breath. Kjeld stared at Kitlun, brows fierce, mouth set grim beneath his outgrown red beard.

“Tracking them was easy. Piss after pale ale,” he said. “Drawing a band of riders away, not so much. Another stormblasted chase.”

“They unhorsed Jinut,” said Kitlun. “Her horse took an arrow. Stumbled and fell. She went under their hooves as they followed us.”

A murmur went up through the Riftfolk.

“She was a fine rider,” said Andral.

“She bred horses for my father,” said Kitlun. “I had a hope she’d do the same for me, when the day came to build and grow again. But she died to hasten that day.”

“Go on,” said Mere. “Keep telling yourself that. Whatever helps you sleep.”

“If you’ve think I’ve slept soundly,” Kitlun hissed, rounding on him with harsh eyes, “a single night since I lost my clan…”

“We sprung a trap,” Kjeld broke in, impatient. “It did what it needed to. We all did. We played bait, Mere waited, shot for the bastard in the nicest coat, riding on the prettiest pony…Two arrows. Neither missed.”

“Bekar, first-son to Csengir of the Weeping-Clouds, is dead,” said Kitlun. “We have a stranger to thank for that. An Eastmarcher with a long footling’s bow.”

“The gods send strange mercies,” said Andral.

“And strange blessings,” Kitlun said. “A great leader needs only to seize them.”

The Riftfolk murmured approval this time. It was a rumbling, like an avalanche heard from far away but falling ever closer. No answers in it, so far as Simra could see. For days they had been fletching and pointing arrows, building barricades, gathering stones and factoring pine-pitch. Then Kitlun returned, with Moridene, Kjeld, three of her riders.

“What then?” Simra asked. “You haven’t won yet, so what then? What now?”

Kitlun faltered. Kjeld spoke to fill her silence:

“We split. Laid down two tracks. We rode hard, crossed the Treva, then followed its shallows for a while. Our trail ought to have been washed away. The others drew them off. They’ll come back here when they’re not being chased any longer. Or they won’t. We’ll see.”

“Rosk,” said Ieva. “Rosk went with them?”

“He did.”

 

_The Weeping-Clouds will be coming. Whether to give Csengir’s heir to the sky, or by following Kitlun’s tracks till they lead here, they’re coming. We agree on that much. But there’s no verdict on what to do about it. My plan doesn’t stretch that far. I’m no tactician. And between them, Kitlun and Andral’s stratagem doesn’t go much further._

_Fight them, they say. Each kill as many as you can. And that might float if things were different. If she had three times as many fighters as she does, and all mad or stupid enough to fight and die for her like they’ve got nothing better to do and no brighter ideas in their skulls. Instead she has us._

_Seven of her own Broken-Thorns. Good fighters, fine riders, and bound by honour or brevity of wit to follow her, no matter what kind of bramble-thicket she leads them through. That includes Andral, who kills with more ease than anyone I’ve ever seen. And then there’s Kitlun too. Eight warriors of the Rift total._

_Three outland sellswords, here by accident and stuck by shit dumb luck. Me and Kjeld and Moridene. And two Stormcloak scouts – Ieva and Mere – more dedicated to this bloody Nordic brand of diplomacy than anyone ought to be._

_Twelve fighters of varying grades. Fifteen ponies, including those found in the stables here. And wood to break up for barricades, strip and whittle for arrows, plane and bind for shields. Stores of pine-pitch, three barrels maybe. Seventeen sheep and five pigs and a small vegetable garden._

_A collection of weapons and armour too. Kitlun and Kjeld both say it’s paltry, but to me it looks like a hoard. Three swords: straight Nordic steel blades on canted Riftman handles. Eight long-hafted cavalry axes and picks and hammers, listed all together because most of them fit uneasily into one category and blurrily between all three. Two rectangular wickerwork shields faced with stretched hide. Twenty-eight arrows, fletched and ready, half of which tipped with iron. One recurve bow. A butcher’s workshop of knives. And whatever weapons and armaments we might have each brought with us._

_And one locked and ironbound chest. And Csaba of the Weeping-Clouds…_

 

“The fuck d’you think you’re doing, Sim?”

Simra flinched, bit his tongue and fixed his mind. It was Kjeld. Even without a voice to go by he could have told from his footsteps: a soft-soled poacher’s tread.

“Eighty-eight,” Simra muttered, holding onto the number. Easier to remember if he said it aloud. He twisted his neck, turning to look up at Kjeld. “Counting nails. What’s it look like I’m doing?”

“In all honesty? Grovelling your way round the hall, losing your blasted mind.”

Kjeld stepped closer, looking over Simra’s shoulder. Simra blew quickly on the page of his journal, cramped both middle and margin with crabbed and tiny scrawl, then clapped the covers shut.

“Why?” Kjeld asked.

Simra took out a piece of chalk and marked the site of the nail with a cross. Then he pushed and shuffled in place till he was sitting, sighing, back to the wall and knees hugged to his chest. “So that when someone asks, I can tell them. Might leave me looking less of a makeweight, right? I mean, nails…That’s binding for shields and barricades. That’s arrowheads and spear-points. Iron, right? You taught me that.”

Kjeld frowned, shook his head. “What?”

“You and Vesh and Siska. Tearing down the longhouse. Not wasting anything. All of it’s got a use. Or most of it anyway. Turn disarray into details, it starts to make sense.”

“Kyne’s breath…” Hard to tell through the indoor darkness, but Kjeld’s eyes had softened. His mouth was doing something strange — sad sort of. “You’re not a makeweight, Simra. Sharp as Winter’s teeth but you still can’t see it…” He turned to leave, out of the hall, where the courtyard echoed with the sound of ringing metal and carpentry.

Simra called after him. “I did wood yesterday as well! All the furniture. Whatever we can take without the hall falling down round us. We’ve got a shitload!”

He went back to counting.

“Eighty-nine…”

 

_Except for this I don’t know what use I can be. I think through the fight over and over. Me and the Weeping-Cloud guard, him with my sword, and me with next to nothing. And what seemed like logic days ago has started to feel like the stupidest thing I could’ve done. I think of the small things that could’ve gone different — chance and my choices. And I figure out a dozen ways it could’ve gone cleaner._

_I don’t regret killing him. I don’t. I saw his face before, and then what I’d done to it after. That would stick in anyone’s mind, and itch and scratch like a burr, wouldn’t it? But I can reason that out. What I regret is what I let him do to me._

_It hurts. Magic and alchemy and drinking can help with the pain, and the thinking, but they can’t fix my arm any quicker than they already are. Can’t make me worth a damn if it comes to a shieldwall in the doorway of this hall. Can’t make me anything but deadweight in a fight. And a fight is what we’ve got coming._

_I’m scared. I need to keep my mind full or else it goes to pieces and I find myself in the stables pretending to check the horses but mostly just trying to rub the red out of my swollen stinging eyes and cough the raw thick crying feeling from my throat. I’m scared for the others but mostly I’m scared for me. And that’s bad too, isn’t it?_

_If I’m right in my reckoning, my sixmonth contract with the Vahn would be up by the end of this week. A little after maybe. No clue why I’ve stuck it so long. No clue why I didn’t run ages ago when it came clear I’d not be around to claim my pay. I told myself I’d give all but all of my first share to my family — get it to them somehow, anyhow. If I die here what’ll they get? Shit all. And they’ll never even know why. Where I went or for what._

_I don’t want to die. For a thousand selfish reasons and maybe a single good one, I don’t want to fucking die. And if I could fight then it might be easier to tell myself I won’t. At least then I’d have a hand in it. Two hands, if I felt like making jokes…_


	45. Chapter 45

“Would any one of us think less of anyone else if any one should choose to run? No. The gods know this isn’t what we signed on for. Fighting for strangers and strange causes, true enough, that’s the meat and potatoes of mercenary work. But getting pressed into it, against odds like these, with no sign of pay in sight? We didn’t sign on for that. The gods only know we didn’t…”

Kjeld spoke slow and deliberate, staring into the embers of the forge. Simra and Moridene were with him, in the shingle-roofed smithy. Moridene leant against a wall, hunched by the low ceiling. Simra sat awkwardly on an anvil, bow-legged, arm still splinted and slung.

He glanced occasional towards the door, out to the patch of ground where he’d killed a man. Blasted through his windpipe and cooked half the brains in his skull. The ground out there was still scorched, remembering it. But he could still hear Kjeld. With the things the Nord said, he spoke for them all. Like a constant mantra as he heated nails and garden tools, making them ready for reshaping.

“There might’ve been a way out once. Run back to the Vahn and tell them the Broken-Thorns have got themselves killed – all of them – and there’ll be no alliance. Say we tried and see how that suits commander Antolios Metaxian of the Red Vahn…That, and trust that the Broken-Thorns have more pressing things to do than to run us down for running off…”

Simra reached out with a foot to work the bellows. With a muttered word and weaving fingers, he helped the forge-flames burn hotter than their meagre fuel could ever manage. Fed on air and magic, the iron shifted up from red-hot to a searing yellow. Moridene stepped forward, a pair of tongs in her hand, plucking out the metal. Simra rose from the anvil to let her work.

“But you heard our witch,” Kjeld carried on. “They’re coming. She’s seen ‘em through her bird’s eyes. Too close now for us to get past.”

“I thought if we could get them in here,” said Simra quietly. “Just the head of them – Csengir and all – then bar the gates, we could take them by surprise. Trapped. Kill the ones that need killing to kick the fight out of the rest…”

“You thought right,” said Moridene. Comforting words if they hadn’t been so cold. “It’s something else, somewhere else, that went wrong. Ieva said they know we’re here, and what’s coming ain’t a funeral procession.”

“It’s a clan riding to war,” Kjeld said.

Simra laughed, dry and joyless. “A whole clan against a dozen of us. That’s not fucking war…”

Moridene was hammering now. The sound was strange – soft and deep and rosy – but its tempo was fast and growing faster.

“It’s whatever we make of it,” Kjeld growled. “They don’t know how many we are and they don’t need to know how few. We make them pay like they’re fighting an army. We make them bleed till they’re bled dry. We had options once. Now we’ve got just the one choice.”

Beard outgrown and flecked with spittle, eyes bloodshot and staring, Kjeld looked like a wildman. Moridene’s hammering sang out harder, stopped with a quick shrieking hiss as she tossed another arrowhead into the quenching bucket, then started up once more.

“We fight and we die,” she said grimly. “Or we fight harder and live.”

“And I am not dying here!” Kjeld spat. “I won’t!”

A trembling had started in Simra’s chest, guttering under his lungs. Like the tightdrawn tremor that came with anger, or the build-up of harsh words he tried not to let himself say. It ached sharp in his limbs, hummed sour in his gums. A painful kind of energy, pent-up and begging. Let me go.

His eyes were wide and his fists were clenched. Simra fought against the catch in his chest, forcing himself to breathe. But Kjeld was staring at him now, trying to meet his gaze. Simra couldn’t look him in the eye. Couldn’t keep his teeth from gritting and his knees from shaking. He was afraid. A thousand reasons, crowding and crushing, like losing Soraya on the Kingsway, needing to scream her name…

“This mess is one of your making, Simra. This place. It’s our best hope and our ripest reason to lose it completely. Choose!”

Kjeld was baying, sneering. Moridene was staring too. Simra’s eyes burnt into the smithy floor but he felt their looks on him. Making and unmaking him. Reckoning him to be as they saw him to be till there was no room to be anything but. So much to prove in proving them wrong.

“Sharpen it for me then!” Simra snapped. His sword was out of its sheathe now, tight held in his one good hand. His face hurt for snarling. “Last fucker who tried to use it didn’t and it got him killed. I’m not making the same mistake!”

He looked from Kjeld to Moridene and back again. A long few moments of silence passed.

“We’re not dying here,” Kjeld whispered, smiling now. His teeth glinted through his beard. “Not a one of us. We are not dying here.”

A new mantra — theirs to share and to hope on, desperate, standing against certainty.

 

_We prepare. Kjeld has fought Riftfolk before. And he knows these are just the kind of conditions where they can be beaten. Out in the open we’d have less than a snowflake’s chance in a hearthfire. But on difficult terrain, with walls and halls and corridors for killing grounds, there’s a glimmer we can cling to._

_I am not dying here. The reasons change moment to moment. The resolve remains the same._

_We’ve made ready every way we can with the things we have. Slaughtered the pigs for meat and fat, used the trotters for daubing glue. Mixed the grease with pitch to line the ditches outside the walls, and to fill jars and bottles. We’ve collected stones for throwing. We’ve gone down to the creek that runs through the hillside, gathered up pot after pot of water to keep on the palisades, and pans of silt that’ve dried now to sand. We’ve shored up the gate, set up barricades of broken furniture in the hall. And worse things. Worse surprises._

 

And on Kjeld’s insistence, for the first time my spearhead has a shaft to it.

“They’ll be here with the dawn, I think.”

Simra cricked his neck, turning to see Kitlun clambering up the hillside slope. Her bow and quiver were slung at her waist and a sword was sheathed at her side. She held a pine-limb torch over her head as she moved through the evening gloom.

“Good thing the nights seem so long these days,” muttered Simra. “Why’re you here?”

“To ask you the same thing.”

“Someone’s got to keep watch,” Simra answered. “Happens that right now it’s me.”

“That is not what I meant.”

Simra gave a snort. “You made it pretty clear. What choice’ve we got?”

“But you’ve helped.”

“What d’you want me to say? That that’s just how I am? That I’m a helpful fucking person?”

Kitlun laughed. She wasn’t meant to. Simra gritted his teeth, grinding them together. Crouching there on the outcropping, back to the old dead tree with its tattered ribbons of cloth and its silent bell, he scowled out across the land stretched before them. He almost wished he could see them already — fires glimmering on the plains. He almost wished he could hear hoofbeats, warhorns. That at least would stop the waiting.

“I think maybe you are,” she said, that misplaced laugh still jangling in her voice. Simra heard her move closer. “You won us this hall. You came here alone, with only lies for arms and armour. You killed for me and mine, and were wounded to open the gates to us.”

She crouched next to him, touched him on the shoulder, through the cloth of his sling. Simra jerked away, so quick and sudden that he winced. He could feel the bones in his arm grinding, even through the vague warmth of the mezga he’d drank.

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” Simra slurred. “Say your piece if you’ve got a piece to say and then fuck off back to the hall I got you. Leave me in it…Fucking peace, that is…Shit…”

Kitlun edged away from him. He murmured a magelight into life and glared at her by its cold-red glow. She stood again, shying a pace or so backwards. For the first time since Simra first saw her she looked unsure. Wounded. Too young for any of this. Or perhaps it was only the light, or the drink, or both.

“My father told me that, once, your people and mine fought and traded through the way that runs east, from the Rift into the Greylands. We had much in common between the ways we lived. Enough sometimes to war over, and enough sometimes to agree. He told me that, as we are in the Rift, your people are in Morrowind. That the world is moving against us both as settled folk call more and more of it theirs. And so between my people and yours we also shared a sorrow…”

“The fuck d’you think you know about my people? Our sorrows?”

“Your face…You are Velothi,” Kitlun said, uneasily. “Aren’t you?”

“You’re the first person ever to think so,” said Simra bitterly.

“Then you are..? What are you?”

“My parents were Zainab. I’m just an elf.”

Kitlun said something that might have been cursing in Riftspeak, glowering at the floor and biting her lip. So far as Simra could make out, her words had something to do with letting the sheep shit down the well.

“You must think I’m very stupid,” she said quietly.

Simra didn’t answer.

“I misspoke. I only meant to say that…that I know something my father did not. That blood counts almost for nothing. Blood can turn on you given the right reasons, the right sign of weakness. As most of my clan turned on my father and me. And I know that choice is more important than blood. Your real clan are the ones who choose you, I think. Those who choose to stay. And whatever your reasons, Simra Hishkari, I am thankful for the path you have chosen. This, I think, is yours…”

She bent at the waist, careful not to come too close to him this time, and set something on the ground between them. When she was gone, and Simra looked, he found that it was his ring. Pewter, six sided, a rune etched on every face.

Simra’s throat grew thick and hot round the curses he muttered to himself. Slipping it onto his finger, he stared off into the night. And at some point, the night-dark became the dark of his closed eyelids — the slip and drag of falling asleep.


	46. Chapter 46

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“About going mercenary. About all the time in your life you’ve spent grubbing for coins, and all the things you’ve done for it. And however much or how little you’ve scrabbled together, it’d make no difference now, would it? It’s just metal, and not the kind that might save you either. Rich or poor, it’d be the same. It’s only flesh that matters now…Makes you think…”

Simra and Kjeld stood on the outcropping at watch. The tree creaked uneasy behind them, its dead limbs harried by the wind. Its coloured ribbons fluttered frantic, like birds on each branch, feet caught hopeless in quicklime. Man and mer, they both carried spears and leaned on them as they peered out through the grey pre-dawn. There were distant lights in the billowing mist. Leftover campfires from the night before, and cookfires newer lit, down on the plain.

“Careful Kjeld,” said Simra. “You’re starting to sound like a rich prick. Only people who prate about how little good money really does for a person are the ones with enough that they don’t notice.”

“Hmph.” Kjeld rolled his shoulders, making the coinish rounds of armour stitched onto his jacket click and crackle.

“Really? Think about it. If I’d had spending money then maybe I’d’ve had better weapons. Armour. Say, a wrist-thing that might’ve made this broken arm a nasty bruise instead.”

“A bracer. Vambrace. Karwasz. Not a ‘wrist-thing’.”

“Fuck off. Point is, those might save me. Make me more likely to save myself. And what about if I’d been born into money? You can have coin but that’s not the same as wealth. If I’d been raised with wealth then maybe I’d’ve been trained better, prepared better. Or – you know fucking what? – maybe I’d not’ve got myself into this situation in the first place, right? Wouldn’t ever’ve needed to.”

“That’s a lot of ‘what if’s for someone with such a job lot of ‘what is’s to deal with over yonder…” Kjeld jutted his chin toward the lights. “How many d’you think? See anything?”

“Fuck…I don’t have special elf eyes, Kjeld. Reckon I can see about as much as you.”

“I count maybe twenty fires. That’s the case then nine or so fighters to a fire means trouble.”

“Could be a bluff, right? Lighting more fires than they need.”

“If they’re half as clever as you think you are, Sim, it could well be…Gods but I hope you’re right.”

“We’ll know soon enough. They start up the slope, the bell rings…And then?”

“We get to working.”

Soon the time came. They rang the bell. Loud for its size. The tree hummed with it for several long seconds after.

 

_If I die—_

_If I don’t—_

_‘If I die…’ I’ve written the words and thought them till they stopped making sense. Like saying something over and over till the sounds tumble and knot together in your mouth and turn to noise. And I still don’t know what comes next._

 

“I see them,” said Ieva. Her voice was not her own. It was a cracked moan, like a bleak wind worming between the jamb and hinges of a doorway, trying to get in. “They ride slow. Good horses, two abreast. Forty fighters and more in reserve.”

She sat hunched in on herself, head down with dark hair hanging. In the hall, shadows played on the planes of her figure and face. Null and dying firelight crawled red on the places where her bones stretched the skin that covered them. And her black fur coat looked seamless — a blot of inky blindness shaped like a coat.

“Bows made strong with horn and sinew. Barbed spears for throwing. A few with screens of wicker, tall as a tall man — they are shields enough for all the shieldless amongst them. Swords and axes, picks and hammers. Thick quilted fighting-coats.”

Her pitch rose. Another of her trances, but Simra had never seen one like this before. She was both here and there, mind stretched between two skulls. He could see the pull of each starting to tear at her.

“At the head of their line I see two men. Csengir Ironfold, lord of the Weeping-Clouds. Long-bearded, broad-shouldered, unbent by the weight of his years. He comes armoured. A shirt of rings and overcoat of hide, strip upon strip of iron riveted to its backing, each overlapping the last. A tall peaked helmet and ringmail hood. And by his side, his son.”

“You didn’t tell us he had more than one son!” Moridene snapped at Kitlun.

“He doesn’t,” said Kitlun.

“He shouldn’t have any,” said Kjeld. “Two arrows. Saw both go in. One straight to the face. That’s enough for any man. That ought to be more than enough for anyone!”

“Bekar, first-son to Csengir, comes armoured like his father. But while his father smiles, sits well in the saddle, comfortable, Bekar is…wrong. He slouches, twitches uneasy. Right eye bandaged over, and beneath it…wrong. A hole where the wrong got in. Why is he not dead? Why is he—? Why is he—?”

Ieva’s back jerked straight. Lids half open, eyes rolling white, a choking sound rattled in her throat. Kitlun surged into place next to her, rubbing her shoulders, supporting her back. A moment later, Ieva went limp, deflating into Kitlun’s arms. Her lips were thin and drawn, flecked with a foam of spit and showing her yellow-white teeth.

“We ought to give her a moment,” said Simra. He’d been pacing all this while and noticed it only now. The shuffle and tramp of his boots on the reedstrewn floor. He stopped, facing the others, the fingers on his right hand twitching and curling.

“We do not have a moment,” said Kitlun, rising to her feet, hauling Ieva up with her. “They are coming. Time is not a mercy left to us. Can you stand?” she asked Ieva.

Ieva nodded feebly. Her breath still rattled — windchimes that reminded Simra of home.

“Good. Can you fight? Will you all fight?”

No cheering. No roar of assent and defiance, like Antolios had commanded from his company. Simra felt no wild rush of enthusiasm, and no surge of love, no desperation to follow. Instead they all nodded grimly. Simra crouched, came up with his spear to lean on.

“Good,” said Kitlun again, sliding her bow from its holster on her hip. She gritted her teeth as she bent back its recurved limbs and strung it. “Kjeld. Tell everyone on the walls…Time, my friends. Time.”

Ieva bent, hissing under her breath, and picked up something from where she’d sat. It was a staff, whittled in the last few days from carved birch, chased with runes. She leant on it as they hurried out and into the courtyard.

The dawn was feeble. For all the push of the rising sun, the sky was growing darker, bruising over with cloud. Below, the courtyard was torn and cluttered. Baskets of stones for throwing. Piles of waiting fuel with pots and pans of water and sand beside them. Clapwork barricades of shattered furniture, staggered round the space and angled broadside toward the gate. There were more platforms leant against the palisades now and each held an archer.

“Loose only when you’re sure of the shot!” Kjeld was shouting up at them. “Loose only when they’re close enough to kill! We don’t have the leeway for wasting arrows!”

Simra had broken into a lurching jog, into the shadow of one barricade. There was his gathersack, empty of all the usuals, clanking now with bottles and sealed jars. He slung it over his shoulder so it hung down on his right.

“They’re dismounting!” someone yelled above the sound of weapons being readied, and the creaking of wooden scaffolds. “Coming up afoot!”

One by one, he lit each pile of fuel, shored up each pot and pan above the growing flames. Then over to one of the platforms. Simra struck the butt of his spear into the ground and clambered up the ladder. By then his heart was swollen awful against the keel of his ribcage. Kjeld was beside him, and Ieva, sharing the scaffold and peering over the palisade. But the whole world felt unreal somehow. Distant and seasick and swimming.

A mist had begun to gather and roll, dark like smoke on the hillside.

“Shit,” someone hissed. Mere maybe, a platform across. “Can’t get a clear shot like this.”

He ought to have seen them, swarming up the trail. Instead there was only the mist veiling their advance.

“They have magic on their side,” said Ieva. “A weatherworker maybe. At least one.”

“Shit.” Kjeld this time. “Anything you can do back? Either of you?”

Simra had heard stories of his ancestors. His parents’ people. Stories of folk who knew songs that would call the wind, and make it move to their melody. What did he know?

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Not till they get closer.”

The mist drew nearer, painful-slow. Simra remembered the climb up the trail. They were giving it the time it deserved, advancing with the mist instead of running. He didn’t blame them. The fog swallowed up the trenches and hedges of the hillside, but he couldn’t see a single warrior. Perhaps that was a mercy. For now the fear kept its distance.

“Kjeld,” called Kitlun down the line.

“Now?”

“Now. If our vision’s clouded then so is theirs.”

Kjeld unlooped a long knife from his belt and leaned over the palisade. A rubbing noise as he began to cut with it, sawing at the three ropes that held their first surprise in check. Simra glanced over the wall. Four tree-trunks hung there, tied up in a cradle of ropes. With a whiplash crack the last tether snapped. The trunks crashed down the hillside. They bounced and juddered, rumbling as they went, then ploughed into the mist.

Shouts and screams echoed up the hillside. Commands barked sharp in Riftspeak. A roaring defiant cheer in return. No faces yet to fear but the voices were nearly enough.

“Mara Motherbear watch us,” Kjeld was murmuring, voice already breathless and ragged. “Kyne Kiss-at-the-End guide us…” He jerked his head round to look down the palisade. “Mere!” he called. “First ditch!”

Mere nosed a pitch-tipped arrow into a small brazier on his platform. The head came up glaring and spitting with flame. Face hard-set, Mere angled his longbow, strained and drew the string deep to his chin. The release was a thrumming sound, nearly silent. But the arrow soared up, arcing overhead, then down into the rolling mist.

A sullen red glow flared up behind the banks of fog. They’d lined the slope’s last few ditches with pine-pitch and slow-burning turf. Now they were ablaze. Silhouettes showed through the mist, sunset-lit by the burning trenches.

“Trunks might not’ve hurt anyone, but they hedged them in to the left. Got them on our bad side, looks like. Good,” said Kjeld without smiling.

The voices called back in anguish. A few yelped and howled in pain. Then dozens of voices crashed together, making one sound. A warcry. It roared and screeched, breathless and constant. Simra’s knees began to hurt. He was biting his cheek, gnawing and licking his lips till they were sore. His palms itched.

“Shit…”

“Wait! Wait for it!”

The screech and roll of it rose up.

“Wait!”

A crescendo.

“Shit shit shit…”

“Wait!”

And then they came from the mist, closer now than Simra could’ve imagined. Howling as they came, swarming forward on foot, a long stone’s throw from the walls themselves. Some came with swords and axes in hand. Some heaved forward the wicker screens while others ducked behind them, bows drawn, sighted, released.

“Loose!” Kitlun screamed.

It was an exchange. The whirr of bowstrings, swish of thrown spears and stones. And past their heads the whistling of Weeping-Cloud arrows, and the thud of sharp iron into the wood around them.

A hundred impressions and nothing clear. Simra saw and heard too much.

Fighters dropping in the Weeping-Cloud line. Someone snarling, groaning nearer by. The grope of his hand in his gathersack, pulling out a bottle, its mouth stuffed with a rag. The calling words at least were second nature. Instinct. Oily fire between his fingers, urged into the bottle-mouth and down into the mix of pitch and grease inside.

He threw. A bad toss – panicked and hasty – but the bottle broke open in a flash of wet and sticky flame. One man charged straight through. Smoke at the edges of his shape, embers starting in his beard and hair and clothes. No telling his voice apart from all the voices round them now. No time to see the fire catch or die on him. Simra threw again.

Ieva raised her staff skyward. The clouds were darker still now. Simra felt the beginning of rain prick and fleck at his skin, seep into his scalp. A stormy scent was in the air, reeking alongside the smoke. The runes on Ieva’s staff glowed, glared, then dimmed once more.

Thunder and bolt came both at once. The noise drowned out every bellow and curse and warcry. A flash of lightning, joining up the ground and sky. Simra watched as a Weeping-Cloud warrior burst half to pieces, torn apart by light and sound. A messy split of torso, a blackened chunk for a head.

Somewhere down the walls they were emptying pots. The first fighters to reach the palisade fell back gibbering like beasts, wreathed in curling steam, scalded by the boiling water.

Simra threw again. This time the calling hurt. His voice was already raw from a shout he hadn’t realised he’d taken up or let go. But they were all crying out, all swearing and threatening, snarling down at the ground before them, and the faces snarling back.

Simra rubbed his eyes with one hand, trying to work away the stinging smog. He heard another arrow, so near then gone. For all they’d planned, there was only chaos now. What came next? He tried to remember.

“Ram! Ram coming for the gates!”

He saw the fires. The figures lit up between them. The pillars of smoke supporting the storm-dark sky. He saw the noise and heard the light. Another lash of lightning baring down from the clouds above.

He saw them come forward with a tree-trunk, iron-tipped, heaving it toward the gate. A shudder went through the whole palisade. The ram cracked into the gate, jarred backward. The men and women carrying it lined up for another rush.

And he remembered. The jars and bottles, pitch and grease had never been weapons. Just fuel. Something will always be eaten. Simra barked the words, grabbed and guided with his hands. He reached out to the three fires he’d made on the wall’s far side. Urged them up and outwards, fed them from inside himself. He felt his palm blister and sting. One of the fires burst into streamers of sparks, tongues of lapping whipping heat. Hungry, it lurched over one of the oncoming fighters, drenching them in flame.

“The ram!” It was Kjeld, shouting at him. Distant and mute through the haze of the magic he was working. “The fucking ram, Simra!”

Snarling, chest light and strange and hollow, Simra reached for another fire. Closest to the gate. It would do. With his calling-words and his gesturing hands and the strain of his thoughts, he pulled it. He dragged the flames towards them all. And like a wave they rushed toward the gate, sparking and smoldering against the ram, catching at the clothes of the ones carrying it. They dropped the trunk of it and moved like they were dancing. Thrashing, pawing at themselves, trying to put out the fire.

Moridene thrust down beyond the lip of their wall. Her glaive came back dark and dripping. Side by side, Mere and Kitlun loosed arrows, sweating. All of them. All of them were smeared with soot, glistening with sweat. And there were others swarming beneath Simra, Kjeld, Ieva.

“Simra!”

A man clambered up the outward juts of the palisade and hauled himself over its edge. He was on their platform, amongst them. Ieva lurched from his path as he swung with the spike of a war-pick. Simra threw himself forward, not knowing why, catching the man’s arm. Kjeld rushed in alongside, stabbing and stabbing upward from down, driving his knife into the man’s belly. Simra felt the strength go from the arm he’d caught. He felt heat and damp slopping round his boots. He saw the man tumble back over the wall to fall amongst his clanmates.

But there were always more.

Ieva angled her staff again. The storm came down a third time. The light and noise and fury — this time the staff shared in them. The runes flared up blinding, sparking outward. Hot on Simra’s face, a sting on his cheek. The staff shattered, splintering outwards. It tore apart, just like the bodies of the three it had struck down.

“Down!” Kjeld barked, and they leapt and clambered down the ladder into the courtyard.

More.

Stumbling towards the first barricade, Simra heard the gate shudder again. The wood was beginning to split. Moridene, Mere, Kitlun, and Andral and his warriors — the rest were coming down from the platforms, joining them on the ground. And behind the walls there were always more.

“Back! Make ready for when the gates break!”


	47. Chapter 47

The gate throbbed. They’d backed the wood lattice with new struts – hard boards – and hammered it closed. But now it was breaking. With a slow undeniable beat the ram bowed it in, shaking dust from the groaning timbers. Behind and below that sound came the constant hack of axes and blades. The gate was beginning to splinter.

“This is not the end!” Kitlun stood between them and the moaning gate. She snarled proud through the blood that spattered her face. White teeth standing out, white eyes staring. “Friends, this is not the end! The gate was never meant to hold them! Only slow them down and blunt their blades. So I say let them strain. Let them sweat! And when the gates break and they come again, be ready!”

Simra didn’t know how anyone could be. No way to be ready for what was coming, or even to accept what had come before. Hunkered behind their barricades. Hands all gripped round spears and bows. Mouths grim-set and eyes fixed all on the same fearful thing. Was that readiness? To Simra it felt more like working the docks again. When a whisper went down the jetty that some foreman or other was on his way. Look busy.

A choked little yank of laughter. Simra twisted his head round, searching for the sound, only to find it was his voice, his laugh, and his own stupid thoughts.

This lull was worse than the fighting, he decided. His head was filled with the howl of his breath. His ears rang sharp with his panting. Simra looked down at his boots and saw they were caked with half-dry near-black gore. Lumpen and awful, it looked almost like mud. And somehow that was worse than the truth. He looked round their halfmoon of barriers and saw the others were stained the same or worse.

Moridene crouched like a cat, stilled at the brink of springing. Her glaive’s off-hacked and bandaged butt was rooted and braced in the courtyard dirt, digging deeper as the rain rained on and the dust turned slow to mud. Her back was heaving, hunched over the polearm’s haft. For a long moment Simra couldn’t look at anything but the way that a stray tangle of hair moved. Each in-breath sucked it flush to her open lips. Each out sent it fluttering.

Beat. Beat and hack and clatter at the gate. Cries and howls and bellowing beyond.

One of Kitlun’s warriors had taken an arrow to the side. He snapped off the shaft just above the dark and growing stain it had made in his coat, howling like an animal, face beastly for snarling. Another Riftwoman steadied him, looking into his eyes and talking hard and quick in their tongue, gripping his shoulders tight.

Kjeld was by Simra’s side. Shield and axe in hand, red beard darkly matted, breathing hard through gritted teeth. Ieva too, holding a spear two-handed, with a long cruel-curved knife stuck through her belt.

“Spears or swords?” Simra hissed.

“Nnh?” Kjeld grunted.

“Spears? Or Swords?”

“Depends how they come.” Kjeld was starting to shake. A kind of bowstring thrumming in his shoulders, his hands. “Foot? Blades. Horse? Spears…”

“Fuck…” Simra whispered. “Aren’t we—? Shouldn’t we—? There’s no plan. We don’t fucking—…We don’t know.”

“No,” growled Kjeld. “We don’t. Not till the fight’s joined.”

“And then what?” Simra’s voice had pitched high now, straining.

“We try not to die, that’s what!”

“I’m not dying here,” Simra whispered to himself. “I’m not…I’m not…”

An axe-head snapped through the gate timbers. Another somewhere else. With a noise like a tree falling, painful-slow and grating, the ram cracked home once more. One side of the gates gave way. The other slammed open a split-second later. And the Weeping-Clouds swarmed through, howling and baying like dogs.

“Swords! Blades! Axes!” Kjeld screamed, spit flying from between his teeth. “They’re coming on foot!”

Arrows cut up the air. Bowstrings hummed. A few fell down from the foremost ranks. They clutched their throats and hunched over their punctured bellies, bleeding into the dirt and squealing. It was the boots of the warriors behind that finished the ones who fell, trampling and stamping as they came. Not the arrows. Simra saw it all. Too much for scant seconds.

The distance closed too fast. Unfair. For the archers, no time to loose a second volley. And for Simra, no fires to reach out and borrow from. They were on them.

A screaming Riftman leapt onto the barricade. A sword hovered over his head, two-handed, ready to scythe down. Simra yelped, stepping backward, spear thrust out and up. It caught the man in the belly. Tangled in his thick coat. Pushed through into his flesh all too shallow. He let go a sound like a thick pelt-rug being being beaten for dust. A wet and bloody splutter. He toppled backwards over the barrier and Simra pressed on with him. He pushed down with his spear, bearing the man into the dirt. Simra saw his Nord-pale hands redden, shining with blood as he clutched at the spearshaft and clawed at his ruptured stomach. They shared the same snarling fearful face. Simra felt it on his own and saw it on his enemy’s.

Simra hissed. The man had stopped wriggling. Only moaning now, gurgling and sputtering. But the spear wouldn’t tug free. “Blast!” He let it go. Left it standing at a lazing heavy angle, up from the dying man’s gut. Eyes coursing wild, Simra reached for his sword, yanked it from its sheathe.

He saw Moridene, howling threats and insults, driving back two Weeping-Clouds with long-raking swipes of her glaive. The head of it gleamed, running with rainwater.

He saw Kitlun still clutching a bow in her left hand, drawing out her sword in a heavy arc. He saw that same motion beat aside a man’s blade then twist in the air – in her wrist – and drive the swordpoint inches through his body. It went in between the collarbones, a thick slow well of blood.

He saw a Broken-Thorn’s spear hacked in two and their head staved in by a hammer. He saw his friends and allies outnumbered. Too many, too many.

And then Simra’s sword was free. He held the blade out straight before him. A dim-glinting shaking line and figures a-jostle beyond it. More Weeping-Clouds.

Some hung back. They were panting, sweat-drenched, weapons gripped eager or uneasy in their hands. They were staring. Sidling round and round the sidelines with eyes searching for advantage.

There was fear on both sides of the fight. It urged some forward, pushed some back. Seeing it, Simra wanted to run. Seeing it, Simra wanted their bones beneath his boots, their blood hot and wet on his hands.

Who charged first? The truth was lost and trampled before anyone could know.

There was rain on his skin, in his hair, on his clothes. A slow path to being drenched. His sword-arm already ached. Blood already ran dark on the blade. He could taste its tang – sword-metal or bloody copper – between his teeth. He thrust out, warded off, hacked sidewards. His wrist twisted, arm jarring as the blade dented flesh, cut as it drew away. And then he was pulling away too. They all were. But he was amongst allies. And he was still alive.

Screaming and spitting, Andral battered and kicked and struck his way in front of Simra. He hooked the haft of a warpick aside with his axe. Simra saw the iron axe-bit unshape a young man’s jaw, come back and crack in his skull at the temple.

Sputtering and cursing, biting his lip, Simra watched, stepping back and back. He couldn’t call flame with a sword in his one good hand. The hand would need to be free. He fumbled clumsy, figuring whether to sheathe the blade again. And all around him was noise. A colourless thrash of images.

The throng had loosened into pairs and trios of grappling bodies, circling fighters. Moridene worked the haft of her glaive, butting someone backward with the stump of its shaft, then arcing through an arm just above the wrist. A spray of blood. Kitlun prowled round a spearman, trying to get round its shaking length.

One of the Weeping-Clouds came for Simra. They were barely a blur on the edge of his vision before he was flinching away, fighting for his life. Blocking hasty and graceless, a rain of blows fell down towards him. The edges of their swords bit and scratched, grating each against the other.

Dark hair streaked with a caking of white warpaint, and more of the same rainstreaked on their face. Nothing more to see. Simra’s ears were full of screaming. His throat rasped tight with hardtaken breath. A final cut crashed inward toward his neck. His smarting wrist and aching arm gave in. The sword twisted from his grasp. Stepping back, his heels ran aground against something. The steps up to the hall rose behind him. They were already beaten back across the courtyard.

The white-painted Weeping-Cloud drew their sword back to thrust. Simra spat a calling, groping within himself for a flash and gutter of sudden flame. Fire and thrust both came at once and Simra twisted sideways. A hot brief line of agony scored across his chest, nicking through his aketon and tunic. Simra’s voice cracked out — not pain but triumph.

“Ha!”

No scent of burning flesh or smoking hair, but the fire had dazzled the thrust, helped him to dodge. Beyond the pain he was still alive. Stumble-crawling along the steps in a halfbroken fall — but still alive.

Red hair and beard and bellowing voice, Kjeld barrelled into the Weeping-Cloud warrior before they could strike again. The force of it threw them both to the ground in a splash and skid of mud. But Kjeld was on top, punching down with his hatchet held just behind the head, regripping his knife and plunging it down. One-two, one-two. He staggered up to his feet again and left the painted warrior on the ground.

A dark puddle grew out from the body, then thinned and was lost in the dirt and the rain. Behind that were others. Dead or dying or hacked to pieces, too wounded and scared and in shock to fight on. Moridene stomped a man’s head into the mud, crying out like a rooster, face tilted skyward. Mere poked a sword into the ribs and bellies of three half-dead enemies, quick, precise, and smiling grimly.

Not beaten then. Not yet. Was this what victory looked like? Simra got to his feet, breath wrenching through him, pant after pant between his gritted teeth. Grovelling where he’d fallen, he grubbed for his sword.

But there was a sound like thunder. He craned his neck up at the sky. No change in the colour, no change in the rain. But Kitlun was shouting something, turning round to them. Her face was twisted with panic. The words made a slow-bleeding sense.

“Horses!”

“Spears! Spears!”

“Horses! They’re up the slope!”

In a surge and a spread they poured through the shattered gate and swept out, storming across the courtyard. Three men and women on piebald ponies. Whooping and shrieking, their mounts screaming and baring their teeth, they jumped the barricade.

“Back!”

Kjeld was scrambling his way up the stairs. Mere hurried behind him. Kitlun was sprinting across the courtyard, shouting orders. And Simra couldn’t hear. Couldn’t think. He was frozen, rooted to the stone foot of the steps. He was tired and heavy and hurting.

One of Kitlun’s warriors was too slow, too close to the gate. Trying to run, he was trampled. Hooves kicked into his back, flattening him, breaking bones. An awkward inhuman shape lay in the mud after that. No saving him and no way to undo it.

Someone was still in the courtyard. Neither running nor holding her ground. She backed up with measured steps, glaive still out in front of her, singing with threat. The storm of hooves and reins and spears and swords swept towards her.

“Mori!” Simra cried. His throat rang raw with the name, felt more than heard. His ears were rumbling with blood.

One rider drew forward, splitting off from the charge and swerving toward her. Moridene stopped, crouched, lowered and grounded herself. Simra saw her face was already livid with blood, eyes and teeth glaring bright through the gloss of it. The horse closed. She jabbed with her glaive, bellowing, mad with fury. The horse reared, front legs scything at the air as it squealed and moaned. She lashed at its legs, thrust forward into its underbelly till the beast fell back on its rider.

Simra moved then, thoughtless, mad with fear. Moridene swept round, scything out to scare off another rider’s mount. Stupid. All of this. Him and her both. Simra had stopped looking for his sword and rushed instead for the spear he’d dropped. Holding it overarm, braced against his good shoulder he hurried towards Moridene.

The one rider circled her, their horse stepping off, afraid of the swipe and stab of her glaive. In a sound like drums another charged in, lowering a sword, wheeling it as he came. Simra felt the impact like a sob in his throat. The blade struck into her. In a dark spray it angled up through the front of her torso as the rider swept past. And Moridene was falling. And Moridene was on her knees. And Moridene was fallen, curled in on her side.

Half-blind and deaf and screaming, Simra ran full-tilt into one horse, spear-first. It sank deep in the beast’s side as it reared and toppled, yanking the shaft from Simra’s hand. He stood over Moridene’s shuddering body, wild eyeing the other rider as they wheeled about for another charge. Then two arrows bristled from the rider’s body. The rider slumped from their saddle. The horse bolted, dragging the corpse where it hung in its stirrups. The rider whose horse Simra had felled cried out, ragged with pain, trapped under his mount.

Four more riders loomed in the gateway. Not safe yet.

Simra lurched down by Moridene’s side. She was still breathing. A wet and ragged hack of a breath, but breathing all the same. Simra tried not to look at the dark spreading across her front. The ragged rent in her clothes and the shattered bone of her chestpiece. He fished in his satchel for one of the dark and resiny chews stolen from his mother’s stores. Anything to stop the pain that had her shaking, sweating, wide-eyed and whimpering.

“Open your mouth,” Simra hissed. She wouldn’t. He had to hold her nose, prise apart her teeth, forcing the alchemy home with trembling bloody fingers.

Moridene gave a shattered hoarse whimper, legs trying to push at the ground, crawl across it.

“Arm,” Simra snapped. “Over my bad shoulder. Come on. Get up, get up, get up. Hold on. Please, Mori. Please…”

She draped her arm over him, grimacing, lips bubbling with blood. Simra groaned, wrenching up to stand again, barely holding her weight as she dragged her feet and stumbled. She slumped.

“Fuck fuck fuck…”

Simra tugged the knot of his sling undone. “Stupid…” Gritting his teeth and snarling, he wrapped his left arm round her waist, holding tight with his fingers as he tried to drag her up again. They both groaned. Pain scourged through his forearm, burning in the muscles, streaking up towards his shoulder. With his right arm he gripped her wrist, holding it, just holding…

“Not dying here…” he muttered numb and quiet. Dragging her, dragging his feet. “We’re not…We’re not…”

Simra heard hooves. Heard arrows. But he didn’t stop. He fixed his eyes on the steps, the others waiting there, the hall beyond. The pain was like wading through silt, through swamps and saltwater. If he’d taken the alchemy for himself. If he’d left her behind.

Someone was calling his name. More than one voice.

The stairs were close. He was climbing.

Hooves and snorting. The screaming of horses.

If he’d left her behind…


	48. Chapter 48

“…Of all the fool things!”

“Don’t.”

“What were you—!”

“Kreathing. I told you. Stop.”

“What was he—! The idiot! I don’t understand. I don’t.”

“He can’t hear you, Kjeld.”

“You don’t know that! Or else try me. Tell me again, I dare you, tell me again he can’t hear me!”

“Listen to me. I said listen to me, Kreathing, sky spit you out! You need to shout? Fine. Shout. Times like that come for us all, at times like this especially. But if you dare shout at him for his bravery, or at her while she is trying to save him..? Don’t. Shout at me, Kreathing. I’m listening.”

“Believe me, clanlord, when I get started on you, you’ll know it!”

Blindness and darkness, afloat on a sea of sound. Far below the heights his thoughts had fled to, his body was somewhere, hurting. Distant maybe, but crying up to him, trying to be heard. It tried to move. The hurt locked it still.

“Dare! Dare? Don’t you dare talk to me about bravery. Don’t you dare tell me that was bravery! Stupidity! Self-slaying stupidity. He didn’t stand a chance! And you put thoughts in his head about how maybe that didn’t matter?”

“You saw him. Them. How she fought and what he did.”

“There is glory in him now, whatever happens.”

“Blast your glory, you bowlegged bareheaded laprunt! And blast how you’ve changed your tune. One moment he’s worth less than dirt. A ‘footling’. And now..? If only I’d known all I needed to do to earn your stormblasted respect was get myself fucking killed..!”

He tried to get back, towards the voices. Down, to sink back into his skin. The hurt turned him away. For a moment he could almost feel it. No good. Back to the distance where all he could feel was cold sweat on him, all mingled through with rain. And the far-off grit of his teeth. And the groaning dry of his throat. The thick wooden stub of his tongue in his mouth, trying hard to shift.

“He’s still breathing. Don’t talk about him like he’s not.”

“Andral is right. There was glory in what he did. One boy, unarmed, against three riders on open ground? If I had heard it, and not seen it with my own eyes…”

“You’d call bullshit, hey? And so will anyone else who hears. She’s good as dead for all the good he did her, and he’s good as dead for all the glory you’ve heaped on him. It was for nothing. None of it meant a thing!”

As good as dead. There was panic in those words. He tried to yelp, scream, fight his way back to himself. 

“Quiet. I said quiet! There—! I saw—!”

Still alive. I’m still alive. It hurt too much for that not to be true.

“His eyes moved! His eyes are moving!”

“He’s trying to cough…”

“Well stop him, blast it! Hold him, he’ll tear something, someone hold—! Sit him up! … There now. There now. Easy there, Simra, it’s alright. Shh-sh-shh. It’s alright now. It’ll all be alright.”

Like to a skittish pony. Like to a night-scared child. Stroking fingers in his wet-soaked hair and on the damp blaze of his brow. Like someone singing a lullaby, but close now, in front of his face. He could smell the words, feel the breath they were made of on his windtorn lips. Alright. Please let it all be alright. Or else just stop.

“Ieva? In or out? We take it out or leave it in? Quick!”

“In.”

“But it’s near enough clean through already!”

“Best it stays that way till we can tend him.”

His vision was hard and blurred, glassy as a marble. He tried to focus. Think of something, see something, fill his head with something that wasn’t this. There was misty daylight striking lines through the dark. An intricate architecture, fretted unreal, all through the gloom. Pretty. Scaffolds and strutwork of white light and dust, holding up the roof and walls and world. Pretty…

Where’s Moridene?

“Here, Sim. Here.”

For a moment he hoped. But they hadn’t heard his question. This was not its answer and that was not her voice.

“Here, Sim. Just you sit here and sit tight. Alright? We’re not dying here. Not a one of us. Not a one more. You’ll see.”

Where’s Moridene? Where is she? Is she..? They couldn’t hear. He felt Kjeld move away. Heard his bootsteps pass across the rugs and rushes of the floor. Don’t. Don’t go, I’m scared, don’t leave. He tried again to speak. Not a sound. Only a welling tugging tightness in his neck. A snake-dry writhing something in the backmost dark of his mouth.

“Bring the girl, Andral. It’s time. They will burn us out otherwise.”

Simra’s eyes rolled in their sockets. The dry well of his mouth and throat gurgled into life. He screamed one long ragged note. He only stopped when the scream ran out and dwindled back to a whimper.

Andral passed, leading Csaba by her hair. For all she struggled, pawing at her scalp and his knotted fist, she was silent. No sound from her but the kicked dog scuffle of her bare feet. Simra thought he saw Andral look at him, somewhere between the shriek and the groan. For all he’d heard him say about glory, there was no admiration in his eyes. He dragged Csaba away – to the door maybe – shouting something. Simra couldn’t hear, couldn’t turn his head to follow.

His back was pressed to something hard, leant against it. Not the wall. Too close to the middle of the hall for that. Between that and the floor, Simra tried to ground himself. An impossible time passed in a few short blinks of his eyes. The pain stretched things, taut and ready to tear. Simra let go another cry. Shorter this time, there was no rage or defiance in it — just a broken pity, like a sob spooled out to shattering point.

The pain was a full-body thing, its borders were hard to plot. Raising his right hand, head thrown back and shoulders heaving, Simra felt a path up his torso, trying to find the start of it. There. In the muscle between shoulder and neck. Simra gritted his teeth and groaned. His lips buzzed and tingled with the noise of it.

“What’re you doing! What’re you doing with that girl, Kitlun?”

“Ending this.”

“We agreed! She’s just a child, woman, I thought we’d agreed!”

“Do you want to fight them off yourself? Ask them polite if they will leave?…Then trust me and trust in my intentions.”

“Blast it, Kitlun! First Simra and now this? I’m not letting you hurt her! I’m not letting you hurt any other hapless sideliner for your blood-feud!”

“You couldn’t stop me, Kreathing. See? My riders know what I must do.”

Far-off voices, gathering distance. Kjeld bellowed, one long and wordless note.

“So tell me! Tell me what it is you’ve got to do!”

The voices dwindled and muffled. They echoed indistinct. Simra’s throat tightened. He was afraid — alone and being left behind. A muscle caught somewhere in his body. Another burst of pain dizzied him. His gorge rose. And that hurt in its own way, as he fought back the sick feeling that rose from his stomach. It left him whimpering in the gloom. But not alone.

“Hey.” Ieva shuffled towards from somewhere nearby and crouched over his outstretched legs. Her dark eyes were sharp on him, appraising. But when she spoke, her voice was flat and tired. “You’re alive. Awake. In pain, yes, but you’ll live if the rest of us do.”

“What is it?” Simra slurred. His voice was dry and creased. “What happened? How did—? Is it bad? What happened – it hurts – is it bad?”

“Easy.” Ieva’s eyes flickered down to where his shoulder met his neck. “Be still. Be calm as you can. Like learning to ride, remember? No fear. You’re getting skittish…”

“Tell me what it—…Shit! Please, I don’t want to have to—” Simra looked down, sudden, surprising himself into doing it. Like jumping into cold water: the trick is just to jump. His head went light, skull filled with a high sharp feeling, like windchill in his ears. “Oh gods…Oh gods…” The angle was bad – the skin wouldn’t stretch – but he could see.

“Easy, Simra. It’s not bad, see?”

“Not bad! I—…oh gods!” His voice slurred, gibbering. “Is there something..? There’s something I should be saying, can’t think what I ought to be saying! Where’s Clovis?”

“Not here, Simra. I am. And I’m telling you…”

“And Moridene? Where’s Moridene?”

There were hot tears stinging at the corners of his eyes. His lashes were clumped and heavy with them, smearing the lids together each time he blinked. There was a film of dirt all over him, and stiff blood plastered to his side. His and Moridene’s. He remembered half-carrying half-dragging her. Then hoofbeats. Fire and smoke and rearing horses, all to his back as he said, hold on, hold on, and they started up the stairs. And then something punched the air from his lungs, screamed through him, and stuck. A dark sharp stubborn something.

He felt another sharp line of pain on the underside of his forearm. A cut. Ieva was rubbing something wet into the small nick. Simra’s eyes fluttered and sealed shut.

“It’s not that bad, see?” Soraya has a look on her face, not quite smile and not quite smirk. “See? Shit, Simra, fuck’re you crying over it for?”

He blushes hot. His whole face prickles with it. Knowing it’s there – so clear where she can see – only makes it worse. He gives a sharp sniff.

“Think crying’ll fix it? That it?”

He shakes his head, quick and furious. The blush is in the short stubble of his hair now, crawling on his scalp like fleas.

“So stop. Nothing to be scared of. Azura’s tits, you’d think someone was murdering you! Come on! You a swaddled babe or a mer grown? Look at me, Sim.”

He does. There she is, slouched and spraddled, legs astride the rooftop’s middle. It’s easy for her, all so easy. She was born with more in her than he could ever hope to gain. Twisted tufted hair and a grin where her adult and children’s teeth vie for position and the front ones seem too big.

“You’re my brother,” she says, soft, soft. “You won’t do it for you, so do it for me, yeah? You’re gonna stop in three…two…one…”

“I’m not crying ‘cos I’m scared an’ I’m not crying ‘cos I’m a baby!” He barks the words, yelps them. Angry tatters before they leave his lips. “I’m crying ‘cos it hurts!” Because he’s a child, still of scalp-shaving years. Not a mer grown at all. Shouldn’t it be allowed?

“Huh. You need to cry? Fine. Bawl your little eyes out. Times come when we all need to, but don’t you dare be loose ‘bout who you let see it. Now gimme your foot, Sim.”

He does. It hurts to move it. A grating shock of pain, hot all up his leg.

But she bites her lip, hunches over his grubby and rag-wrapped foot. “Ooh. Very nasty, Sim. Reckon we’ll have to take it off.”

“No! No we won’t—!”

A flash of pain, and then nothing but a slow throb. Between her bloodied fingers, Soraya holds something up to the light, triumphant. A shard of broken glass, wet with his blood.

Ieva scrutinised something in her hands. Simra had cried out but already the sound was simmering down. A threadbare giggle, then a rustling chuckle, then nothing but the uneasy hiss of his breath.

“Here,” said Ieva, holding something out to him. The crude flat iron head of an arrow, a few inches of shaft. From her other hand she let go the snapped tail end: nock and fletching and straight wood, clattering to the ground. “Keep it.”

Simra lurched toward her, reaching out a shaking hand. The rustling laugh came back a moment, rattling in the back of his mouth. It still hurt but not so much.

Ieva closed his fingers round the head. Its faces were wet but drying thickly, its edges almost blunt. He tried to get up, legs pushing and feet scrabbling at the floor.

“Stop it,” Ieva said, pressing both hands to his shoulders. “Sit.”

Like talking to a dog. “It doesn’t hurt,” Simra bristled.

“Liar.”

“I can fight! We all need to. We’re not dying here, not a one of us!”

“No need, Simra,” she sighed. “Even if that was true, and it’s not.”

“What? Moridene? Where’s she?”

“Alive… It’s over, Simra. Sit…down…”

“Kitlun…” he sighed, half-remembering, slumping seated again “What did she do? What’s she done?”

“She fought him,” said Kjeld, loping into view. “Used Csaba to bargain him into a duel. Csengir’s dead. A scrap of a girl and an old man. A real storm of a fight…” Kjeld grimaced.

Simra tried again to stand. To turn his head and look around. “And they just..?”

“A couple of them took issue, yeah. Loyal Weeping-Clouds, Csengir’s son — not that he was right in his skull to start with, mind. There was a bit of a brawl but we did alright, hey?” Kjeld was holding himself different: hunched and concave, too tender.

“And everyone else just..? Decided it wasn’t worth the trying?”

“Half the rest were Broken-Thorns once,” Ieva nodded. “I think they are again now. The Weeping-Clouds too.” A rare ring of admiration sounded in her voice. 

“Our little princess is out there with them now,” said Kjeld. “They’re all dealing with the dead. Ours and theirs…”

There was a pause. It stretched on too long for comfort.

“What happened to you?” Simra asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m tired,” muttered Kjeld.


	49. Chapter 49

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's worth mentioning, if you were previously up-to-date and waiting on this chapter, that I messed up my chapters and numeration recently, somewhere between here and Chapter 42. As such, you might want to check back, over the last few chapters for anything you haven't seen before. A chapter or two was lost, but now is found. Things should make better sense now. Thanks.

_Still alive._

_Still alive, but recovery is exhausting. This place has gotten to be exhausting. Like it’s heavy now with what it’s witnessed. The blood swallowed down by the hungry black dirt. The constant caw and circle of birds, black-shaped against the sky above the hillside where the bodies were taken, all wrapped nameless in their shrouds, hasty stitched from salvaged cloth. And like its weight is something we all help to bear on our backs, each hour of every day. Or maybe it’s just me? What I’ve witnessed here and what I’ve done._

_The courtyard is pitched full with tents now. A little township of them, all crowded together round the hall where Kitlun holds court. Or counsel. Or whatever the Riftfolk word might be._

_Watching them all as their two clans become one, perhaps I ought to be surprised how quick they form bonds, forget grudges, make peace. In spite of all the corpses made on each side. In spite of betrayals, brutality, burnt halls. But I think I understand it — or part of it at least. How war can leave you so weary you’ll trust in your direst enemy if it means a chance at peace. Or else it’s just Nords. A people who raid each other for sport a full quarter of the year, hide away in the Winter, then smile and trade the whole rest of the time. That, I’m as far from understanding as ever._

_An outsider amongst it all, it’s easy to feel more foreign than usual. Kjeld is better off for that. He likes not dealing with the Riftfolk, and the Riftfolk not treating with him. But mostly I feel forgotten. And sometimes that’s good, but only sometimes._

_Three days since my first battle. Not just a fight or a scrap or a brawl but a battle. Some of it I remember, and see clearer now than when it happened._

_I borrow from the fifteen fires I lit. Voice hoarse with the sound of spells, I snatch the fires and reach out with their flames to grab and catch at the oncoming enemies. I tried not to see their faces then, but now I recall a few. Blue eyes in a weather-tanned face. Dark hair in two long braids, hung with bells I couldn’t hear over the sounds around me. They come with a ram for the gates. Like a child making waves in the White River’s waters – cupped hands and sweeping arms, splashing – I haul the heat of my fires over the ram and its crew. And I look away, not wanting to see what comes after._

_A spear in my hand, driving it into a man’s gut. I’m weak, but his momentum lends strength to the spearhead. On the ground he snarls, I move the shaft, stirring the life out of him. Streaming with sweat, slick and cold with rain, breath sharp._

_Moridene struck down by a horseman’s sword. She lies on the ground – in the mud – writhing, twisting. Like a fly with its wings pulled off. The movement, I think, is what made me hope. And the hope is what made me charge. Stupid, Kjeld said. One of the stupidest things he’s ever seen anyone do. But in my mind’s eye, I see myself make for the horse, spear couched under my arm like a Western lance, because I have only one arm to wield it._

_I remember taking her to the hall, using my bad arm, both of us bloody and broken and wading through pain. Then the rest is all aftermath. The things I have been told._

_Should I be proud? Of any of this? All of this? I want to be, I think. I fought and I survived. Three days on and I have wounds to show for it all. Not scars yet, but they’re on their way. And in the stories – in ‘Haelun & Amratur,’ The Underkings’ accounts of the Tiber Wars, and every battle-hymn I’ve ever read – scars are something you wear like marks of honour, things you compare. They’re ways to read someone’s deeds in their flesh. But in reality, I remember Ostwulf. How his scars were what got him forgotten. And currently, mine don’t feel glorious. They just hurt._

_But Moridene is alive. Improving. And I’m glad. She’s still alive, and I’m glad of it. Maybe even proud._

 

“No!” Moridene yelped, writhed away recoiling. She screamed with pain as her stitches stretched. “No you don’t you fuckin’ dare, don’t you dare bring that shit near me, I won’t, I ain’t gonna!”

She hadn’t left the hall since Simra dragged her in five days ago. Every shadow inside had eaten up her cries by now. Every moan or gust of wind echoed her. When there was no meal cooking, no pipesmoke or woodsmoke or peatsmoke in the air, the wood breathed out the scent of her blood. Her unwashed body and unwashed hair.

Tending to her now, Simra reckoned he knew what fear smelt like. A sharp stench, sallow and yellow. He mopped her brow with a cool dripping rag. Mere held down her arms, Kjeld her legs, and Ieva rubbed a pale-blue paste into the long cut down her torso.

“Seen what you do!” she shrieked. “I seen what you can do with that an’ it ain’t comin’ near me!”

“She’s moving too much,” Ieva hissed at the two Nords. Tighter or she’ll tear her sutures.”

“Fire fire! Fire!” Sweat was already pouring down their brows, standing out on their straining arms. She was strong, and scared, half-feral with days-long pain. “Won’t LET YOU!” They could barely hold her down, let alone hold her still.

“Knife,” said Ieva. “You know the one.”

Simra dropped the rag into a pewter bowl and stretched to one side. Hand unsteady, he passed Ieva a thin slip of a knife, with a clear oil coating its tip. Ieva took it artful in her hands and cut, small and precise, into the muscle of Moridene’s arm. Slowly the struggling stopped.

“Ssstupid,” Moridene slurred. A dumb and dreaming expression shaded her face. Her eyelids drooped. “I’dn’t ask you for ssshit…An’ now you gone got me b’holden…bas…tard…Shoulda left me…I seen what you did…I seen what you do…” Her head slumped back against the wall, and the straw bedding, cushions and blankets they’d heaped there. “Don’t you let him…don’t you let him near…” She fell wordless. Not silent. The mumbling carried on nonsensical.

“Worse than when she’s sober,” Mere muttered.

Kjeld gave a pained grunt of agreement.

Simra curled his lips and kissed his teeth. If she could say that about him broken and drug-drunk, dosed for her pain and terror… “How long til she’s – uhm – better?” he asked, slumping back to kneel, sitting on his calves.

“Depends what you mean,” said Ieva. “Able to bear up sober? Able to stand and walk? How long before she’s fighting fit?”

“Stand and walk. That’s a start.”

“No magic, so…” Ieva shrugged. “Could be two weeks. Could be more.”

“More if she doesn’t want it to hurt like she’s having her guts spooled out and knitted with,” said Kjeld.

Moridene had hurled threats, fussed herself into a drowning sweat, wriggled and scrambled til six of her stitches tore the first time Ieva had tried to start a mending charm over her. Nothing strong, nothing dramatic. Ieva admitted she was no great healer with magic. But Moridene had fought til fat tears streaked her cheeks, screeching like she was being murdered. And Simra knew better by now than to start a mantra to speed his own healing in anything close to her earshot.

“And you,” said Ieva, firm-voiced, turning to Simra. “You set your arm back by weeks trying to carry her.”

He looked down at his left forearm. Still slung close to his chest with clean undyed cloth. Still bound tight, splinted stiff. Useless and immobile. His lips pulled back from his teeth.

“Won’t be fully fine til into Last Seed,” Ieva murred.

 

_I walked in the courtyard-camp. A strange thick feeling, loping down towards the same people we fought days ago as enemies, on these same stairs. Twined steam and smoke rose in leaning towers from cookfires, cauldrons of milk tea, mezga, stew and soup. A city-busy murmur of voices, and beyond that the cry and neck-bells of goats out on the hillside._

_The closeness of the hall – the stench of injury and the sound of it – had started to get into my skull and stir things. I don’t think my boots will ever be one even colour again, but the battle left me at least with both my legs. Feet for walking. More than can be said for many._

_Yet out here was another kind of tension. Riftfolk at rest but not putting down roots. Places like this ought to only hold them for Winter, when even seasoned and habitual roamers know better than to roam. But here they were unmoving, and towards the close of Midyear. Not knowing when they’d up and herd out onto the plain again. It was the same sort of stranded snagged frustration I’d seen and known on the docks when the White River froze over — no ships, no boats, no work to be done, and a threat of no coin for that day._

_The Riftfolk milled round listless. Some sat and drank. Others made work for themselves, selling what was in their pots by the bowlful. Hawking crafts in some cases, but mostly selling salvage. Bits and scraps from the battle’s afterbirth._

_Jingling baskets filled with arrowheads. I felt the one that Ieva pressed into my open palm, broken from its shaft, on a braided string now round my neck. It sits inches to the left of the thick-poulticed wound it gave me above my collarbone. A reminder that if it had struck me where it hangs now, I would be among the other dead, picked at by birds on the outcrop above us._

_Items of armour, horsehair ropes, bridles, saddles. Staved-in helmets with the dents beaten out. Scorched cloaks and coats and smokestained leathers. Looking at them, I wondered how much my hand showed in each blackened edge or smoulder-frayed hem._

_A circle of Riftmen crowded and bayed about a pair of shag-haired dogs. They were forcing them to fight. Cheering and jeering at them, placing their bets…_

_For the first time in months, I saw money changing hands. And for the first time in months, I felt the weight of my purses — the savings I’d gathered up and all but forgotten. Not a market. Nothing so formal and far less for sale. But merchants, at least, and hawkers, and that was more than enough to stick in me sorely and remind me of home._

_A jangling coat of mail rings, being beaten out like a rug, lain over a scowling Riftwoman’s knee and scoured of rust. Dead men’s boots, tied in braces and hung from poles like rabbits back from hunting. Eight or more young Riftfolk arguing over the price of a fine unstrung recurved bow. Or what I reckoned to be a fine one, knowing shit-all about bows…_

_Amongst it all I saw something familiar. Dull, lustreless, nearly forgotten on one quiet sullen hawker’s woven-reed mat. I might’ve passed it by with barely half a glimpse. But by my luck it caught my eye. My spearhead. Nothing special except in the sense that it was a gift, and by that virtue unique. Black iron. Elongated triangle for a tip, with horizontal lugs where a dagger would have its pommel. The point from a boar-spear. Mine. Wrenched from some horse’s side, or dug out from the mud…No matter how, it had come my way again._

_In a broken motley of languages, I spoke to the trader. And I asked him how much for the spearhead. He asked how many I wanted, and I told him just the one, pointing at it. Missing his front teeth, his words came in hisses and whistles. His laughter was worse by far: a wheezing spit-sounding haw. In cracked Tamnordic, he told me not to waste his time. That the junk on his mat was for sale in bulk or not at all._

_I gentled him in the end. I had no sword. Had lost it in the battle. I said I’d buy a blade if he’d only give me the spearhead. 2 silver shillings, 2 iron pennies, 2 copper — over 300 drakes total. Perhaps the most money I’ve ever paid in one go. More than a third of all my savings. I was proud for a moment, but quick enough it felt like a kick…_

 

The new sword was a pretty one. A Riftfolk rider’s sword with its slight-canted handle, ending in a curve, curling away from the wielder’s grip like a horn. That pommel might’ve been a carven animal’s head once, but the rub of time and press of hands had smoothed it. Just a perpendicular jut now, with bumps that might once have been eyes or ears, and all made of heavy yellow polished bone, studded through with three rust-stained iron fixings. The metal guard was narrow, the mirror-shy steel blade broad, double edged, seamed on one side with two deep grooves.

Simra cradled it across his lap. His hand traced the smoothworn hilt. His fingers fidgeted with the quillons. He was so often this way with new things — fine things he only half-deserved. Loving them as fierce as he could to make stronger the makebelieve that they were worth what they had cost him.

He fumbled with the paired rings on its scabbard, trying to figure them out. How best to fasten them to his sash with only the length of rope he had. How to do without heading into the courtyard again tomorrow and setting down coin for a swordbelt. Resting on his knees, gleaming with firelight and chased with shadows, the sheathed sword had a guilty weight to it. Worth it. Every penny. Simra tried not to doubt that. Instead he moved on to nettling himself for losing the one he’d had before. Why have anything nice if he’d only break or lose it?

Off to the hall’s middle a thickly red-spiced stew of mutton was cooking in three different pots. Under them the firepit glowered, restored, ablaze across its whole length and breadth.

Kitlun’s favourites lined up, heads bowed, flattened into silhouettes against the firelight. She was dressed like a clanlord now. A draped headdress of gleaming discs, white bone and horn on one side, gleaming copper and bronze on the other. A silver-chased shawl round her shoulders. To every rider in line, she gave two ladles of stew, a bowl of warmed mezga, and a word. There were tens of them in that row. More still sat in the hall. Her hall now — her court.

Simra’s stomach growled, turning and turning, like a feral dog bathing itself in dust. But the wound near his neck and the thick poultice over it had made it hard to swallow. Water was a chore. Food was a struggle. Pain took the taste from things. He didn’t move. Didn’t have the energy to deal with the disappointment. Even trying to figure out the sash, the scabbard, the rope was a failure waiting to happen. How was he meant to tie knots one-handed?

Out in the courtyard, distant singing. Here in the hall a cry went up. A girl’s shriek, warbling, already teary-thick.

“Where’d he get this?” Ieva barked. “Where’d it come from?”

Simra’s head jerked up. In the shadowed rear of the hall Ieva stood. The seer’s dark hair was lank and wild. Her face was blotched, livid and pale both at once. Straining with a scrawny arm, she dragged a darkwood box with her into the firelight.

In front of her, Csaba grovelled, wordless mouth agape and staring at the box. She’d been a healthy child some weeks back. Plump and growing and with colour in her cheeks. But she was stunted now and more meat sloughed from her bones with each day. Matted hair and a sallow hollow frightened face.

“What have you found, Ieva?” Kitlun said, pacing over, an even note of warning to her voice.

“Not found,” Ieva snapped. “It’s been here all this while. Under our noses. Under our feet. But it’s only now I opened it and—…” She looked down at Csaba like she was ready to kick her. “Where’d your father get it! Who gave it him!”

Csaba cringed, whimpering, crawling backwards across the reed-strewn floor.

“Kyne’s mercy…” Kjeld hissed, settling down awkward onto his haunches beside Simra. “Ieva,” he called across the hall, hand cupped to his mouth. “Ieva, she’s just a girl. A child! What’s she going to know about her father’s doings?”

“He left her here in his stead, Kjeld!” Ieva turned her face on him. Here eyes were mad like Simra hadn’t seen before. “He trusted her with his affairs well enough for that!”

With a wrap-booted foot she toed open the lid of the box and thrust her fist inside. It came up with a many-sided sliding sound. Like knives being sharpened. Dozens of them. Ieva opened her fingers and let the gleaming handful fall. On the ground and against each other, the sounds rang through the hall.

Simra’s heart swelled and tightened in his chest. Coins. Falling coins. Sudden as a whip he was on his feet, moving over. Silver coins scattered on the floor, and more by far heaped up in the little box.

“D’you know what this is?” Ieva held up another handful, letting the coins fall one by one as she called out to the hall at large. “These aren’t shillings, friends! This is Imperial! Imperial silver!”

Murmuring rippled through the hall’s broad belly. Like the room was digesting this news, finding it hard to stomach.

“And where’d it come from?” she hissed at Csaba, then turned to Kitlun, bowing her head. “Lord, she’s the last one alive that’d know…”

Kjeld muttered under his breath, following Simra into the growing crowd that had clotted round Ieva, Csaba, and Kitlun.

“A man!” Csaba wailed. “A man! He came from the South. He—…he—…” She was sobbing, the words hacking out of her throat and nose, wet and sore in their sound. “He hadda red cloak! He came cross the mountains witha tall horse anna box an he—…he spoke to atya..!”

Kitlun bent to crouch next to Csaba. She spoke to her in a small voice. “And what did this man want, Csaba? In exchange for the box?”

Ieva stood by, silent and seething. But eager too. Like a dog waiting to be thrown a bone.

“Something—…Something I—…I dunno!”

“You can tell us, Csaba,” said Kitlun softly. “After all, we are kin now, you and me. Sisters.”

Simra remembered Kitlun’s story. How she’d been forced to kill the last woman who called her sister, fleeing from the blazing timbers and smoke of her own burning hall.

“…He said…he said my sister should get married. That she should marry your brother and—…”

“And the rest, lord, we already know,” said Ieva, reverent.

She looked away from Csaba and didn’t look back as she leaned in, whispering to Kitlun. As she did so, the murmuring rose questioning through the hall. Simra’s hand gripped clammy-tight round the scabbard of his new sword. His skin crawled – on the back of his neck, at his hairline – like the prickle that comes sometimes before rainfall.

“Friends!” Kitlun called out, arms spread wide, pacing towards the head of the firepit. The crowd moved with her, listening. “Clanmates and kin! You who were born to my clan and you who have come to it, hear me. You who were once Weeping-Clouds, hear me well.”

“I don’t like this…” Kjeld muttered by Simra’s shoulder. “Not one stormblasted bit…”

“Your once-lord sold you as puppets,” Kitlun continued. Ieva was beside her, hissing unheard words. “Only now can we see the strings. We see the strings and we see the ones holding them, pulling them, all along. The Empire of the heartlands to the south! The Empire, whose knife is felt and twists in our backs, even where its mailed hand – its red legions – are absent! It was the Empire who paid your former clan to betray mine. With Imperial silver it sows war between our clans — all the clans of the Rift. With greed it keeps us weak, and makes the new lords – the landlords – of the Rift strong. Through our greed and grudges the Empire will wear at our traditions and our way of life til they dwindle and die and are lost. Will you stand for this?”

A roar, triumphant, defiant. Simra’s ears rang painful as the timbers of the hall echoed.

“Or will you stand with me? Will you stand, as I stand now, in trust of our northern cousins, against the subjugators and leeches of the South? Do you see now why I, Kitlun Broken-Thorn, lord of my clan by blood-right and battle-right, will ride with Ulfric Stormcloak, king in Eastmarch? To unify our clans – every tribe – under common law. He fights to preserve the way we live as Nords against foreign influence — the foreign yoke. And so I will fight for him, to preserve the way we live, all of us, as men and women of the Rift!”

The roar became a howling baying scream.

Simra edged backwards, dragged by a hand on his good arm. Kjeld, pulling him away then gripping him by the shoulders, holding Simra to face him.

“This…All of this… I knew it. Ulfric, Eastmarch, all of it. It’s not war amongst the holds he wants, it’s—…Blast it all, we need to go. We need to get away. We’ve done enough – all of this – we need to go.”


	50. Chapter 50

Two days’ travelling behind them and the River Treva ahead. It poured silver-gleaming across the plains below, widening westward til it became the beginnings of a lake. A ribbon that spooled into shining wholecloth, overlaying the land til it stretched past and below the horizon’s broad lip. In the sky, stripes of rain-dark cloud mirrored the snarls and strikethroughs of wood and thicket below.

“What d’you see?” Kjeld asked.

“You’ve got to stop asking me that,” said Simra.

“Now that I’ve learnt it briars you the way it does? Never!”

Simra let go a rattling groan somewhere in the back of his throat. He looked from the plains ahead to Kjeld beside him. The Nord leaned forward in his saddle, squinting into the distance, canting over his pony’s thick neck. One hand balled and stroked in its mane. The side-knot of his hair was matted nestlike. His red beard was unkempt, snaggling over his mouth and tangled from his chin. But somewhere beneath it, Kjeld was smiling like he used to. Joking like he used to.

“You’re a shit, you know that, Kjeld?” Kissing his teeth, Simra heeled his mare a few steps forward.

They were perched on a ridge of rock, earth packed into each crack and seam, knitting the stone to the highland heath at their backs. They’d been sliding downhill since leaving the hall, but now the slope grew sharper and steep. A jarring rocky freefall waiting to happen. Simra saw broken bones in every broken stone. Twisted ankles in each turn they might make.

“Isn’t much of a path,” said Simra. “None that I can see.” He sat his mare straight and stiff. Arm still slung, it was hard to trust the reins one-handed — hard to trust his makeshift saddlecloth or stopgap effort at stirrups. “Come all this way. Fucked if I’m gonna break my neck on a blighted pebble.”

“You’re right,” Kjeld smiled. Nostrils flaring, he breathed in a great lungful of mountainside air. It came out moments later as a shut-eyed sigh. “We’ve come all this way, and now we’re coming back. Worse has tried to stop us and worse has tried and failed. So. What do we do?”

It was easier to look at Kjeld properly when the Nord wasn’t staring back. Under his beard his cheeks had grown hollow. His skin was sallow and sickly tinged. Hunger and worry had turned the sockets of his eyes to sinkholes. But Simra had known Kjeld long enough to see he was happy. As close to the man he’d wintered with in the mountains – with Siska and Vesh, with Shora – as Simra had seen him in nearly two years. How long before he started singing again? Hasten that day. For all he wouldn’t say so, Simra was looking forward to it.

“I reckon…” Simra squinted down over the craggy descent — out along its length. He groped with his tongue round his backmost teeth til he found the words Kjeld wanted to hear. “I reckon we keep on. Yeah? Til we find a good way or a way we can make one. No risks though, right?”

Kjeld shrugged, spoke like he was reciting: “Final strait or far to go, short-run path or longest road; riding fast or trekking slow, coming home is coming home.”

With a knee he guided his pony from the edge and steered her along beside it. Simra followed. Or rather his mare did. Wasn’t that what Ieva had said made her a good one? That she knew what needed doing — what direction needed to be taken and at what speed. All he needed to do was stay seated. Frowning, he rubbed her neck by the withers.

“Kjeld…What was that? That poem…song…whatever.”

“Just something I remembered, but…d’you know, I don’t remember where from. Falkreath maybe, or maybe nowhere at all”

“Huhh. Might have to write it down. It’s nice…”

 

_We shouldn’t have left her behind. She who’d come so far with us. Who volunteered to go with us when we were singled out from the Vahn like black sheep from the flock — lame foals from the herd. But we left Moridene._

_The logic of it holds and the reasoning’s sound. Nords may grow weary of war but they sooner grow weary of peace, and Kitlun had chosen her new warpath. It lay with Ulfric Stormcloak — it lay in uniting the Rift, uniting Skyrim. Months back, that might have been our fight: the war the Vahn were paid to help wage. But Midyear’s almost done. The Apprentice is slipping further into the path of the rising sun each daybreak. My sixmonth contract’s over, and Kjeld’s been parted from his daughter too long._

_We needed to get away before Kitlun’s cause roped us in. The call of war has a kind of tidal pull to it. Resist, get free, or it’ll snatch you up one way or another. And Moridene couldn’t travel, could she? She’d slow us down, and even that slower pace might hurt her — undo what little healing she’s so far taken to. And that’s if she chose to come with us at all._

_It was the only option we had. So why do my guts feel so twisted round the idea of it?_

_Not that we slipped away into the night, stealing off without warning or goodbyes. But there was no fanfare to our farewells either._

_We spoke to Ieva and Mere, who said their work as Stormcloak soldiers kept them with Kitlun._

_We spoke to Kitlun, who laid both her hands on our shoulders by turns. She pressed her brow to mine, cold-metal in her new headdress. I flinched back from the closeness of it, but she was smiling, disarmingly sincere. She thanked us as her brothers, gave us each a share of silver, offered us more if we would stay… But even silver – more than I’ve ever seen, let alone owned – didn’t seem quite worth signing myself away again, headlong into who-knows-what and for who-knew-how-long. It stung worse than arrows or broken bones to leave that temptation behind, but we took our leave with what we had, and asked for nothing more._

_Last of all I went to Moridene. I told her I was glad. Glad that she had clung to life. Glad that she was on the mend. Glad to have fought beside her, trained with her. Glad that she’d shown me that the roots on blue ravelbyne flowers are just as good as the petals, and that probably there was a metaphor in that somewhere. I told her that now we were even, because if she thought I’d forgotten that she’d saved me too, on the banks of the White River back in Sun’s Dawn, then she’d taken me for a bigger idiot than even my own actions could prove me to be._

_I said that I was glad to have known her._

_I don’t think she could hear me. Her eyes were closed and her breathing even. But maybe in her dreams she got a sense of what I said. Or not — and perhaps that’s for the best after all._

 

“There’s no way…No way we’re crossing that.”

Simra pushed his voice loud, over the rush of the glutted river. The Treva was swollen in its banks, bloated first with snowmelt and more recent with rain. What had looked silver from a distance was now mud-brown. Dammed along its muddy sides with stranded hunks of driftwood. Carrying underbrush, scummy whorls of fallen leaves, showing its speed in just how fast they appeared and just how soon they vanished from view.

Kjeld was sullen and silent in a way that tugged tendons in Simra til he was drawn and knotted up inside. The Nord rode his pony a little further down the russet bank. Its hooves sunk and slid in the sucking mud. Like he was testing the river, seeing if it might part for him, or stiffen its face icily and let him over. Like he was going to ford it out of stubborn spite. But he wouldn’t dare, would he?

“Kjeld?” Simra tried. He wanted to tell him no, don’t even think about it, come back and we’ll find another way. But a tentative easeless whine was all he could summon. The world had been saying no to Kjeld for too long. “Horses can swim, yeah?”

“Aye,” said Kjeld. “It’s a risk – never not a risk in that – but aye, they can swim.” He didn’t turn his head. Just carried on staring across the river.

The plain stretched round them. The mountains had turned their foothills flat a day’s ride to their backs. Out beyond the river Simra tried to see what Kjeld saw. In all this emptiness, struck through with only a brown torrent of river, the other side looked the same as this one. Grass that lost its texture, turned to simple colour, then was swallowed up by sky.

“We don’t know they’re that way, Kjeld.”

“They were before and could be still.”

“They’ve been fighting a war,” Simra pressed. Like Kjeld might not have noticed. Like any of them had the privilege of not noticing. “We all have. Just think. How much’ve we moved round in – what? – three months, hm?…Please!” The last word surged free with more force than Simra had tried for. Between his knees the red-brown mare gave a startled jerk and began to shy.

Kjeld’s shoulders slumped. The coinish little studs stitched onto the arms of his jacket clinked and folded together with the motion, between patches of silence where the metal had been damaged, struck free. “We don’t have the first clue about where to start,” he said, dismounting with a wet thack of boots and mud. “Do we?”

Simra said nothing. Just tried to keep his left arm motionless and soothe his mare still with artless strokes of his right hand. Calm thoughts. For all things were falling apart and had been for so long now, Simra sought out calm kind thoughts. Home, the hearth-shrine, wind-chimes out on the Rigs. His mother, scratching out sigils and alphabets in the ash by their fireside, teaching him… The mare whickered and came to a tense halt.

“Kyne… Here’s why Antolios gave us Ieva. Blasted homing pigeon of hers…” Kjeld dug at the dirt with a booted toe, cutting a trench into it that filled quick with grim-coloured groundwater. “Instead we’re searching blind.”

“We don’t need her.” Simra tried to sound like he believed it, but what mattered was that Kjeld did. “He sent you, remember? A tracker. A fucking good one, right?”

Kjeld hung his head and gave a sigh so ragged it became a cough. He threw one arm over the back of his pony, like his feet wouldn’t support him anymore. His other hand clutched to his side, pressing against the ribs, like trying to pin his stuttering lungs and hold them still.

“Kjeld?”

The Nord had turned away, hacking his rough-hewn breaths into the crook of his elbow, into the cloth of his saddle. There was something sick in the shake of his shoulders — the sharpness of how they moved and heaved.

“Kjeld, are you—?”

He was crying. The coughing had stopped and turned to huffing ill-hidden sobs.

Simra froze a moment, hoping it would end. It wasn’t right. Kjeld had held together, always, all this time. Through worse than dismal odds. Through worse than gruelling deeds. By Simra’s side, determined though hopeless, at the gates of the hall and before its steps. By Simra’s side through the arrow-wound that pulled him from the fighting. And only now… And only now…

It was too much. Tumbling down from his horse and onto his feet, Simra’s back jarred as he landed. His pierced-through shoulder tightened – a torn pang of feeling – as he lurched to Kjeld’s side. “Hey…” he murmured through a tightset grimace. “Hey now…”

“It’s alright…” Simra said, soft as he could. Trying to remember how Kjeld had spoken to him, sane safe and solid, when pain had made him mad. “It’s alright. You’re not crying ‘cos you’re scared, hm? You’re crying ‘cos it hurts…” The comforting words were awkward in his mouth. They tasted like lies on his tongue. But he reached out with a fretful hand and place it on Kjeld’s arm. “All this — it’s frustration, right? It’s not failure. Not failing. We haven’t—”

“Of course I’m fucking scared!” Kjeld slapped Simra’s hand away. It stung. Simra flinched back, stepping off, hiding his hand in the chest of his aketon. “I’m scared I’ve lost her! Lost them! I didn’t tell her—…Should’ve. Should’ve told her ‘leave tracks’. Her or Siska or someone…” Kjeld spat into the dirt. “I’m scared of being the woodsman who can’t track a merc-band on open ground in Summer. The father who—…” Kjeld tailed off, dragging a grubby palm down his wet and livid face, fingers through the spittled tangle of his beard. “I’m scared how much this feels like a joke. All this shit and all this surviving and now..? And now..?”

Kjeld doubled over, coughing again, til dark ropes of drool hung low to the ground from his lips. Simra rushed in, straining to hold him upright. For a moment they struggled. Feet sliding in the mud. A tendon standing out on Kjeld’s neck, a vein bulging near one overwide eye. Simra let go and staggered off. He twisted and stumbled to keep his balance.

Looking down at his fingers, Simra saw blood. A thick and tacky clot of it, smeared on his hand. His face stiffened, twisting wooden, and his breath came quick. The start of a whine behind his teeth and the beginnings of terror.

“You’re hurt!” Simra’s knees were bent, feet out and balanced. He’d slipped into a fighter’s stance his body wouldn’t ease out of. And for a moment he panicked, convinced it was him that had hurt Kjeld somehow in their struggle. Stupid. “You’re hurt and you didn’t fucking tell me! Didn’t fucking tell anyone? How long?” he snarled. “How?”

“It’s fine…” Kjeld slurred. “I was fine…” But his face had gone from ruddy to bloodless. Waxen pale. “I was—…” He rasped. Wavered on his feet. His voice went out of him with a groan and he slumped to his knees, still trying to talk.

“No! Nonono! Kjeld!” Simra pounced forward, knees slamming into the dirt next to Kjeld. His arm was around him, straining to keep up the Nord’s weight. “Kjeld? Fuck this fuck this stay with me, please Kjeld, please, keep your eyes open!”

The Nord’s breathing was laboured. His lips were still trying to form words but his eyes had gone dazed and distant. A kind of teary caul glossed over his gaze, pooling at the corners. Kjeld’s hand was clutched shaky to his side, just below his ribs. There, around a stitched-shut rent in his jacket, a dark stain was spreading through the fabric, creeping between his fingers.

“You’re alright!” Simra hissed. “You’re gonna be alright!” He meant it now. Needed so badly to believe it. “I promise…I promise…” He looked round, hair wisping wild about his face.

The horses had bolted from the shouting, retreating to shy and graze a careful distance away. Even if one was nearby, there’d be nothing for it — he couldn’t heave Kjeld over a saddle. Not with one hand, and perhaps not even with two.

“Kjeld, I want you to keep pressing where it hurts, right? If you can hear me, keep pressing!”

Simra planted a knee against Kjeld’s back, trying to hold him upright. Getting up in a mud-slick lunge of limbs, Simra curled his one good hand into the collar of Kjeld’s jacket and hauled.

The red-haired Nord gave a gurgling groan that turned into a scream. More like effort than pain though, and that was good — Simra had to believe that was better than nothing. Better for certain than silence.

Simra’s breath wheezed and hissed between his gritted teeth. Tug after tug, each one wrenching at the muscle of his shoulder, crying in the muscle of his wrist, Simra yanked Kjeld’s seated body away from the riverbank. And when Kjeld groaned or sobbed out, Simra bellowed and snarled just the same.


	51. Chapter 51

Kjeld sat against the windbent trunk of a tree. Arms across hugged round his body and with his head bowed down, chin into his chest, he might as well have been sleeping. One sleeve of his jacket covered the dark down-trickling stain of blood that had started from his side.

His breath was shallow and tattered. Sour-smelling like the beginnings of rot when Simra leaned too close. He ought to have been thankful that Kjeld was breathing at all. But every flinch and flutter of his lungs was so feeble. Every jagged exhalation was foul. Hard to find anything worthy of thanks in that. Hard to imagine any gods who might be worth a prayer, in plea or in praise.

Simra crouched near him, squat down on his haunches. The balls of his feet were sunk deep in mud for all the time he’d spent unmoving. The clay-red colour of the wet dirt round them caked his boots, smeared his trousers, spattered his clothes. What was untouched by mud was freckled darkly with rain. Some Summer this was, all wind and showers…

But he’d managed to herd together the horses again. They browsed the clumpy damp grass nearby. Hardy things. Even the dripping tree overhead was taking worse to the rain than they were. Lank and dripping manes, wet-glossed coats, weighed down with water. But they had a moment’s rest, and grass, and quiet beneath an open sky. If they had a definition for happiness, Simra reckoned that would be it.

“Look,” Simra tried, pointing out the patchy canopy of leaves above them. “Trees the colour of coinage. Just like you promised, right? Before we ever came here…”

Kjeld didn’t respond or stir. Only carried on breathing, no more and no less. Overhead the leaves sulked heavy – their copper and gold and reddish leaves dark with water – and poured fat drops down over the two figures huddled below. A cold wet overflow whenever any one leaf grew too full and drooped.

Simra hissed, curling his lips into a snarl as a freezing trickle washed down the back of his neck. His hair was sodden and pasted to his forehead. His skin was clammy and his eyelids were puffy. A feeling lay on him, like the toll taken by scores of sleepless nights.

“Fuck this,” he muttered. “Fuck this fuck this fuck this…”

He’d pulled open Kjeld’s jacket, yanked aside his tunic to get at the wound underneath. A yellow-fringed purple-red welt, an inch or so across when he tried to feel round it with a finger. He didn’t dare test how deep. Instead he’d clamoured in his bags for the little pot of pitch-dark ointment he’d taken from his mother’s supplies so long ago, splashed his digits with mezga from a clay flask at Kjeld’s waist, and dipped them into the tacky astringent paste. He’d rubbed it into the wound as Kjeld stirred and snapped in his sleep. It ought to help. It ought to be helping. But who knew over how long?

“Fuckin’ lifetime under a drippy tree. Right…Right…Get comfy. Yeah, fuckin’ right.”

Perhaps the balm had already done all it could. And perhaps it could only do so much. Like he himself could only do so much. And Kjeld could only bear so much…

“Shit, Kjeld. Fuckin’ crowshit…You’re not dying here, yeah? That’s not how the fucking story goes.”

Simra’s voice was frogged and weak from pressing words to Kjeld’s unhearing ears, and from the bellow and struggle of dragging him over from the bank. The trough and trench that their journey had left – dug by Kjeld’s hips and scrabbling feet – was already muddying over. Full of water, it rippled with rainfall, and soon enough would be gone.

He would have liked to write. Or try to write at least. Sit with his journal open on his lap, pen and ink to hand, and see what words might come. That always helped to order things. A way to find in things a sense he hadn’t known was there — not til they were outside him on the page. Life was a dozen kinds of chaos each vying with each, but stories had structure. Fiction held together like fact never could. And if he could just spin all this into a tale then maybe he’d hold together too.

But the rain would ruin his pages, make the ink run. A waste.

Simra bowed his head down towards his bent knees. It hung heavy between them. Loosed and errant from the knot that kept it back, his hair bedraggled downward, running with water. His back heaved, shoulderblades jerking like the wings of a lime-trapped bird. Something trying to get free. An awful heavy heat, it coiled and billowed like stinging smoke from between his lungs, then broke free of his lips. A sob. And swallowing it back after that was like trying to stomach broken glass. Jagged ragged hacking sobs. Tears that dripped warm and stinging from the tip of his nose, the point of his chin, the ruin of his lips.

He halfway hoped it might work like writing. Letting go what was tangled up inside him. Wasn’t that how tears worked, in the stories? A release. But instead it tied the knots tighter — made his throat raw, his eyes rough and painful. It made the skin of his face feel wind-chapped, ugly and stinging.

“Stupid…” he whimpered. “Stupid stupid…”

“Simra?” Kjeld’s voice. Coarse and weak, but his voice all the same. “Are you—?”

“It’s fuckin’ raining!” Simra snapped. He didn’t look around. Not til he could rub the red ache from his eyes, the salt and mucus from his sore face. “I wasn’t, alright — I don’t — I mean — it’s fuckin’ raining’s all.”

Kjeld coughed up the last broken bit of a laugh that never quite was. “That it is…How’d we get here?”

“Dragged you.” Simra pawed at his face, dragging the knuckles of his right hand across his cheeks, jamming them into his boggy eyelids, sticky lashes. “D’you not remember?”

Kjeld only gave a wordless murmur.

“You got stabbed. Don’t try to hide it and don’t try to deny it ‘cos I saw, right? That’s a fucking bone and I intend to pick it.” Simra’s voice was quiet. Hard and flat as a blade. “You got knifed and didn’t fucking tell anyone and now you’re going to tell me how, and tell me when, and tell me why. Clear?”

Simra rounded on Kjeld when he carried on with his silence. The Nord’s face was sallow-grey, drained, dark as rainclouds round the eyes. Split threads of burnt-out blood vessels stood out through his pallor, faded red at his temples and on his blunt nose.

“I’m waiting, and you’re not going anywhere, so believe me, I can wait a good long while.”

“…That’s what I was afraid of.” Kjeld winced and unhooked one arm from the way the other had grasped it across his chest. He rubbed the jaw beneath his beard like someone might rub a bruise. “Not going anywhere, I mean. You saw Moridene,” he croaked. “Stranded.”

“She wasn’t stranded anywhere til we decided to fuck off without her!” Simra’s legs unbent. For once he towered over Kjeld, a figure in rain-darkened clothes against the rain-white sky. “We should have waited. For her and for you.”

“And for you maybe too. Arrow clean through you near the neck — maybe we should’ve waited for you too. But then where’s the line when time comes to draw it, Sim? How much time can we waste that way and not know what we’re missing?”

“You could have died!” Simra hacked at the air with one arm, emphatic. “You could have died, Kjeld. Pointlessly. After all the shit you saw yourself through, and you could still be dying from something that just waiting would have fixed! Or something that I could have fucking fixed if Clovis had—..!”

He tailed off, turned, stalking a few wet steps away then stopping to yowl in frustration. All the things he could have made different if Clovis had taught him to heal others and not himself. Or both. If Clovis had trusted he was strong enough for it — sharp enough for it. As things stood, all he had was a lullaby for muttering to his own flesh at night, asking it to knit and mend. But when had his body ever obeyed him before?

“D’you want to see Shora again?” Simra barked, spinning on a heel, hunching towards Kjeld once more.

Kjeld nodded, weak but sincere.

“So stop trying so hard to fuck that up! Yeah? And what now? Ghosts and bones, I’m fucking telling you! Til you have a blighted care, we stay here…You sit there. You don’t fucking move, and you get fixed.”

“…How long?”

“Tonight. Tonight at least…” Simra sighed as the fire went from him, burning down quick as it blazed up. “I – uh – worked some alchemy into that jab. Let’s give it time to do what it does, alright? Let’s just…give things some time.”

Across the plain a breeze picked up. It groaned and surged, like it was carrying all the hurry and noise of the nearby river towards Simra and Kjeld. Above them the limbs and leaves of the tree hushed and croaked, shaking off heavy falls of water with every shift it made.

Simra trudged a few paces and put his back to its trunk. The layered cloth of his aketon was soaked through, darkened to a scabby rosewood red. He knew by now how long it would take to dry. Tight somewhere in the back of his mouth he made a kind of disgusted rattle of a sound. Beyond caring, sodden as he was. Or so he told himself. Thankful he’d already gotten as sick as ever he might from the damp and the cold, and survived that well enough. Or so he told himself. He couldn’t say the same thing for Kjeld.

“It was after the duel.” Kjeld began weakly.

“…What?”

“You asked me how and when. I’m telling you. Csengir and Kitlun. I told you how—” Kjeld stopped to wince. “—told you how there was a bit of a…brawl after, hey?”

“Didn’t tell me someone tried to put a shiv in you.” Simra kissed his teeth. “Small detail though. See how it’d slip your mind…”

“I was fine…You should’ve—” Kjeld spluttered to suppress another fit of coughing. “—should’ve seen the other man…”

“Who was it?” Simra asked, past his bitterness. It was always hard to resist when he caught the scent of a story.

“Some nobody.” Kjeld gave a dry gurgling laugh. “A nobody looking to be a somebody by knifing the man who killed finally gave Bekar Weeping-Cloud a proper killing.”

“It was you killed Bekar then?”

“Me who finished him, aye. Not that Mere didn’t try, weeks back, mind. Put an arrow straight into his eye but it just—… well, it must’ve hit wrong. Mixed something up inside his skull without just snuffing him out…They held him back all through the duel like he was some child. A dog that didn’t know and couldn’t understand what was happening between Kitlun and his father. Didn’t know why the fighting had stopped. When Csengir fell to Kitlun’s blade—…” Kjeld wheezed again, wincing as he tried not to cough. “Water?” He reached out an unsteady hand.

Simra’s lips opened. A single brittle syllable of a laugh spilt out. He quirked an eyebrow, gestured all round them. Water, water, everywhere. But the same hand fell a moment later to unhitch the waterskin from his belt – Siska’s gift to him, a past-life ago – uncap it, and pass it into Kjeld’s waiting hand.

The Nord drank messily. Clean water spilt through his beard. He grimaced with every swallow, then sighed like each gulp had been bliss. “When Csengir fell, they couldn’t hold Bekar anymore. And most of those’d been holding him joined the fight that he rushed to start. Kitlun put a sword through him. Straight through from the back. Ieva had jabbed a spear into him by then. But for all that he wouldn’t stop. It was me that took his head. Four hard knocks from my axe…Never a simple thing, severing a head — remember that…”

“…and getting stuck under the ribs? That just – what? – complicates things?”

“I told you, I was fine. Little thing in the hands of some little boy. Barely a knitting needle.” That was a lie. Barefaced bluster. Simra had felt the wound and knew its width. How deep it went was a fearful uncertainty. “It’d closed over and stopped bleeding by nightfall,” Kjeld insisted. “Just that blasted cough that opened it again…”

Simra felt another rush of tears well up in his chest and race up his throat. He rolled his eyes and grimaced, turning his face away to look the way they’d been heading. The rain hung like a mist all across the distance, confusing things, turning the world whitely opaque. No real sun to see the time of day. Just a vague diffuse light, from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.

“Right pair we are,” Simra muttered. He’d begun to shiver. Wet as it was, his aketon did nothing to warm him now.

“Think,” Kjeld wheezed something that might have been a laugh. “If Moridene had come with us too, that’s more wo—…”

“It’s cold,” Simra interrupted. “I’m cold. Guessing we can’t have a fire out in the open like this?”

“All this mist and rain, I’m guessing no-one would see.”

“So…Reckon I’ve got it on good authority from the best tracker in our party that the only thing stopping me from making a fire is finding something to burn?”

“Mnngh.” Kjeld grunted in agreement. “Good luck on that.”

Simra shrugged, glancing over at Kjeld to smile weakly. “There’s always something.”

“For you maybe. To an elf with sparks at his fingertips and a belly full of embers, everything looks like something to burn.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re with me, isn’t it?” Simra’s smile had grown into a smirk. Not so much embers in his belly in that moment as pride. A warm alcoholic kind of glow, whether Kjeld had meant it as a compliment or not. “You can say that again sometimes, if you like. Take that over ‘what do your special elf eyes see?’ any day. Just so we’re clear…”

He glanced up to the branches above them. Water streamed onto his face and left him squinting through half-lidded eyes. It wasn’t lending them any shelter. Might as well make it serve as best it could.

“Your axe,” Simra said. “I’m gonna need your axe.”


	52. Chapter 52

_Sometimes it dawns on me. By the standards I kept for most my childhood I’m now a rich man._

_By the food alone that Kjeld and I have shared between our saddlebags, I’m comfortable. We have bread, dark and dense and bittersweet as black stout. We have a small sack of parsnips, golden-yellow onions, pink-skinned potatoes, little burnt-orange gourds. We have a whelkshell spiral of cured spiced sausage. A bag of chippings from a tough leathery side of Riftfolk wind-dried mutton. Stuff from the pantries and courtyard and gardens of a minor lord, I suppose — things from Kitlun’s new hall. Simply put, we can eat when hungry._

_Last night I hacked branches from the tree we tried to shelter under. I torched and warmed them til they were dry enough to catch sparks and foster flame. We warmed ourselves by the fire – Kjeld and me – and our clothes steamed soaked-to-damp in the heat. I let myself get reckless. Enjoyed the simple luxury of being warmer than I needed to be. Then once the fire had turned to embers, we were hungry. So I cooked._

_The gourds had thicker skins than the ash- and dirt-yams I knew from home. Reckoned they’d fare well enough amongst the fire’s fragments and ashes, baking through as they blackened on the outside. And in my kettle, over the coals, I simmered up scraps of sausage, potato, onion, into a sharp-scented redspiced broth._

_For all we were in the wilds, working with only what we had, it’s more than I’m used to having. And that’s without considering that I have a sword. That I have a horse and saddlebags for lugging all this excess._

_That’s without considering that I’ve got six pieces of silver scattered between my spending purse and the secret saving-pockets sewn into my clothes. An Eastmarch silver shilling, and all the rest Imperial: a little square terce, and four thick round sesterci._

_But I’m still cold, and still scared for Kjeld — scared for us both. I didn’t sleep any easier than any other night in my life. Worse than many, I reckon. And I was just as pleased at the rain letting up, late that night, as I was at having a fully belly, and the knowledge that there’d be bread the next morning to break my fast on._

_None of it satisfies. Not even close. Really I ought to have learnt by now, these things are like horizons. You chase them, strive towards them, and all they do is shift. Happiness is having enough. And all I know about ‘enough’ is that I don’t yet have it, or else I’d be happy._

 

The river ran on their left, broad and brown and streaked with flotsam. They rode the same way it flowed: the same direction and same slow drawling progress.

It was like they’d spoken too much under that tree. There were too few words left to say. Simra had bared too much of himself and seen too much of Kjeld, and now everything was rubbed raw. Ruined by how significant it all felt, or else felt like it ought to be. For the same reason goodbyes had never felt right to Simra, talking at all now felt wrong.

“Riften,” Kjeld grunted.

He was slouched on his saddlecloth, shoulders canted awkward. His injured flank made his whole stance lopsided, shrunken and caved-in on the left. Simra found it hard to look at him for long. Like he’d found it hard at first to look at Ostwulf, whose maimed legs drew his eyes in grim curiosity, only for a kind of shame to veer them away again.

“On the eastern edge of Lake Honnrich,” Kjeld continued when Simra said nothing at all. “If there’s news of the war anywhere, it’ll be there… If there’s talk of the Vahn anywhere, that’s where we’ll find it.”

Every word prickled. Kjeld’s voice was hoarse, tight, like the wound was pressing up into his lungs from beneath. He raised it only enough to speak over the ambling thud of their ponies’ hooves and the river’s constant drone, but to Simra it still seemed too loud. He flinched away, frowning, reining his mare a few steps off from the Nord.

Before them the river swathed out gradual and subtle into a wider span of water. Fragments of island stood in the flow, breaking it up into clenched rapids, dammish clogs of stranded branches, leaves, dead and discarded things. Beyond, the river spread wide and even, smooth-faced. A dimly glassy lake. Simra looked at it sidelong, not searching so much for anything on the horizon as for a reason not to look at Kjeld.

He was tired. For a while perhaps he had been, but could only now admit it. Nothing seemed as good as sleeping recently, but when he bedded down each night, sleep wouldn’t come. Wanting it worse made it harder to catch. A familiar something was hollowing him out, leaving no room for rest, or even the smallest pleasures, or slimmest reprieve. Any time that passed felt like waiting — nothing more. And he reckoned that’s what travel becomes, when the destination’s more important than the journey.

“A day or two’s ride now,” said Kjeld. “Not likely more.”

And Simra knew he was lying to them both. The Nord had begun to flag, needing to rest oftener for every rest they took. If they needed to set a harder pace, Kjeld would soon fall behind, or tear open the clotted wound again just to match Simra’s speed. It bothered Simra that it wasn’t bandaged or dressed…

“Raiding season though, mark that. Whether that means the war’ll be raging sharper, or whether that means it’ll be all but stopped for the sake of smaller squabbles, though… Anywhere else in Skyrim, there’d be an understanding in Summer. Jarls war all the year round but the Summer belongs to carls and ealdors. But the Riftfolk do love to be different.”

Worse than being spoken to was not knowing what to say back. Not thinking quick enough to make any reply fit quite right. There was no worth to his words recently. No point in any response. Action or inaction, all it achieved was the trickling by of time.

 

_The rain’s let off but the clouds stay low and refuse to part. A sullen sun mopes behind them and heats them to boiling. Below the faded white enormity of sky, the plains shimmer and blur, like the air itself is sweating, starting to glisten. We sweat in its grip. It presses, gets into the clothes. A couple days’ turnaround and now Summer has started muscling in, making up for its lateness._

_Kjeld says that all this is likely raiding weather. That Summer means swords and shields — saddling your horses, stringing your bow. So we try to go wary by day and hidden by night. Come raiding season, every Nord’s a bandit to anyone he doesn’t know, Kjeld says._

_But Kjeld says a lot. And maybe some of it’s useful and the flatnote is in my failure to understand. Dim these days, dull and growing duller, like a knife too much used. But a lot of it’s just words. Not saying anything at all for all his talking. It rubs away at me, like a stone in my boot, birthing a blister. Til I’m angry, tired, and all the words pouring out of him have sapped every last kind word out of me._

_More than anything I want silence. A chance to be alone._

 

Even the river had started to bother him. At first it was a half-welcome reminder, harking back to the White River, Windhelm, home. But noticing that he missed all that bothered him more than the missing itself. And now the river was a lake, and its tides were just another kind of noise, droning on in the eye and the ear.

Over the last three days what Simra knew of silence had been redefined. No such thing as nothing anymore. Even quiet times were filled with the Treva’s rush. When there was no wind to rub its flanks on the grass, the Treva whispered. In the rare times that Kjeld fell wordless, and the hooves of their horses were muffled by the ground’s damp mulch, the Treva roared in every meander, sighed in every strait. And in the corner of his vision, it was always there.

That morning they’d ridden from dawn, tearing at chunks of dark bittersweet bread in their saddles as they went. Then a rest, as Kjeld wrapped his arms round himself, walked down to where the water lapped at his boots, and looked out across it. The hidden sun gleamed on the studs of his jacketed shoulders as they shook and heaved. Simra sloughed off his aketon, lips curling at the heat, struggling with his sling and splints. He threw it flat over the back of his mare like a second quilted saddlecloth, and carried on in trousers and tunic, with his riding-bowed legs hanging down next to the aketon’s limp arms.

The sun crested the middle of the sky. Hours passed and it slid behind the two riders, tilting westward, but its warmth lingered into the afternoon.

At first it was a smudge in the distance. Riding made it blossom into view, drawing in details as the heat-haze loosened. A cluster of buildings squatted on the lakeshore. A village, crying out in colour against the tan banks of the lake and its milk-tea pale brown waters — painted walls and black roofs.

“No smoke,” said Kjeld. “No sound, no comers or goings… That’s cause to be careful.”

They edged away from the water, circling round to eye the village. Jetties plied out from the lakeshore, but no boats were moored there, and no boats set off or returned. The closer Simra and Kjeld drew, the emptier the village seemed. Not a glimpse of life or shift of motion. Only the red-painted beasts and green-daubed spiral-branching trees against the plastered walls of each little domed hut.

Underfoot the grass had changed. The earth was soft and giving, rilled with texture, recently turned. Weeds crowded the ground and sapling trees stood bare as spears stuck straight-up into the ground.

“These were fields,” Kjeld said. “Fields and fruit-trees…” He looked down at the short-cropped burr of grass, the choke of young-grown weeds. “Reckon someone led their herds through here, mark that — chewed and trampled to nothing, or else—...”

But there were no herds now. Just the silence Simra had been craving. Only now it was eerie, smothering and thick. Kjeld’s voice didn’t so much break it as lay atop it.

“Or else..? How long ago’d they come?” Simra asked, voice small and dry from disuse. “The raiders. How long and how many?”

“Raiders? Pshhaw. You think raiders did this? Not any kind of raiders I know, or else there’d still be folk here, livelihoods left over. Nord raiders steal surplus — they skim off the top. It’s a sport, a statement. This is…”

Kjeld flopped from his horse with a laboured sigh and moved into a difficult crouch. His fingers pressed through the weeds and young grass. They came up again charcoal grey.

“…Ash,” he said, shaking his head. “Riftfolk do love to do things differently…”

“How long ago?” Simra repeated. “How many?”

“For all we know they’re still here…”


	53. Chapter 53

Stepping soft through the tall grass and choking weeds, Simra drew his sword. A different feeling from his last. Longer in the blade, it came slow from the sheathe, with a growling purr of steel pulling against the scabbard’s metal muzzle. Satisfying maybe, but Simra knew enough about swords to know it should’ve been silent – a hiss at most – or else by grating it’d blunt the blade.

Riding, walking, fighting had worked Simra’s thighs stronger, thicker these last few months. Now they bunched and coiled with the instinct to crouch — hunker down into the overgrowth, the closer he drew to the clustering of buildings. No sense in that anymore. Anyone left here and hiding would’ve heard and seen them coming way back.

Darting a look over his shoulder, Simra saw Kjeld. The Nord was keeping distance, sitting high in his saddle, on watch with the reins of both horses held in his hands. Simra reckoned he saw him nod. A subtle small approval.

Sword gripped low, blade whispering flat through the grass, Simra forced his back straight. He ought to have felt something, moving in to check the hamlet for raiders, bandits, bodies. Apprehension or excitement or fear. Perhaps he felt all that and more but the grey had muffled them silent. There was only the thick-laid normality of his heartbeat, his breathing, the salt prickle of sweat at the small of his back.

He stepped over something solid, sheetlike, feeling it through his boot. The collapsed boundary of a wattled fence — a pen for pigs and sheep maybe, its woven switches pelted over by the grass. Hustling the last few strides, Simra stepped quick to the rear wall of an outhouse. Its shadow stood over him as he backed along its drystone flank.

For a moment he tried to listen. Nothing but the shushing grass and the wind on the lake’s flat waters. He caught himself creeping again – pointless – and sidled round the outhouse, sword loose in his hand, along a gap between stores and huts. A moment later, he was standing at the hamlet’s center — what might’ve been its heart before it shrivelled hollow.

A tall but stoop-branched birch stood up from the tall-grown grass. Like the spindly birch that grew from the outcropping over Kitlun’s hall, its limbs were tied with twists and tatters of fabric — undyed cloth, frayed and fluttering in the breeze. Around it, a clutch of huts and outhouses cluttered the lakeside. Walls made of slabbed flattish riverstones, piled up and held firm by the way they fit together. Roofs that carried on the same way, domed like the crests of helmets, keyed together from rock, mortared with muddy clay while the walls were dry. Most among the huts were barefaced, but some of their roundish walls were plastered, painted with the same patterns Simra had seen on Riftfolk embroideries, rugs, carvings. Running horses, curling antlers, twists of cloud and vine, and bramble and branch, all daubed in a wet dirt red, sky-blue, grass-green, outlined in inky charcoal pigment.

Nameless and forgotten. Clapped together jetties spurred out onto the lake, tied with claypot buoys, strung fast with ropes of woven gut, twined horsehair. But no boats were moored and no boats returned.

Simra checked each squat hut, going in sword-first. Eight or nine in total, and every one was still and lifeless, but not quite empty. Things had been left behind. The ransacked clutter of families, lives in the living. The grey had made him fearless for how distant and cold everything seemed — a numb pine-pitch-slow failure to care. But a sense of guilt cut through as Simra explored. Every hut he checked felt like an invasion. Like he was wronging every person who had once called them home.

 

_No bodies. Not anywhere in the hamlet. It’s full of life, I suppose, if I count the weeds growing up through the half-rotten rushes on the floor of each hut. The mushrooms reclaiming each corner. The grass grown tall and full of whispers at the hamlet’s heart, all round the tall creaking birch._

_Whoever once lived here is long gone. Months back, Kjeld reckons. He says the folk were likely driven off by a raiding party – a warband – or else killed and left for the wolves and foxes and birds, unpieced to nearly nothing by the time we arrived. But I wonder if maybe they didn’t just leave. Like newcomers piled into Windhelm from the country — more each year, settling in the Quarter or the docks for want of other choices. Why shouldn’t it be the same for other cities? Only they left so much, I think, that they must’ve left in a hurry._

_Then again I’m no tracker. Not any great traveller either. No real knowledge of country people and country things. Kjeld’s probably right. Or at least cutting closer to the bone of truth in all this than I could._

_Any case, we’ve decided to stay put a short while. Til we get back our strength for the last push to Riften, Kjeld says. Though by ‘we’ he means ‘I’, as people so often do._

_I don’t mind. There are roofs here, and hearths, and I’m tired. There’s enough scatter and refuse cast off here to wake up and occupy the rag-picker in me, and little enough of everything else to put the whole rest of my mind to sleep._

_Maybe this is what I need for a while. I can’t always be up and doing. I’m weaker than that. Like the fire in me needs to be banked up, left burning low as I gather fuel for it, before it can flare hot again. I’m weak, stupid, slow, and need time and the means to work around those facts. Leave constant striving for heroes, and stronger people, better people than me._

 

“How bad is it really?” Simra asked but didn’t look up.

Kjeld sat in a flattened splash of grass, back to the birch-tree’s trunk. The sun was on his face, flushing it ruddy-pink. He spoke without opening his eyes. “What?”

“Your wound.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I? Heed that if you’ll pay heed to nothing else.”

“That’s not what I was asking and you know it,” said Simra, flat and sullen. “You were stabbed. Not the kind of thing most people just walk off, is it?”

“Some can and some do. Stabbing’s a hit-and-miss kind of thing. Something gets hit, or nothing gets hit, and the rest comes down to chance. The same’s true of arrows and you ought to know it. We both have the gods to thank for making bodies so badly — with so much nothing in them.”

Simra grimaced where he crouched and shot Kjeld a rank-scented look. “Answer the fucking question…” he groaned, pleading. “Is it killing you? You gonna die or not?”

A thick clay-malleable silence fell. Any other time it might have made Simra uncomfortable as words simmered up in his gorge to fill it. But this silence wasn’t his doing. It was made from Kjeld’s wordlessness, and as far as he was concerned, it would fall to Kjeld to break it. Simra looked back down to what he’d been working on.

Before him sat a shallow strongbox of smooth dark wood. He’d dragged it out here from inside one of the painted huts. One where wizened wisps of overdried herbs hung from the rafters, unrecognisable in death. Where the stoneware fragments of a mortar or crucible and several clay jars lay smashed and scattered across a timeworn workbench. Where a stool lay on its side, one of its three legs eaten away by damp and rot. But he’d found the strongbox untouched, held closed fast with an iron padlock hung from its jaws.

Once plain black metal, now the padlock glowed with heat. Red glaring only moments ago, it was already fading to a seething slow-burning purple-brown. Simra had let himself get distracted by questions, but in the silence he took the time to reach down, searching inside himself, using the breath he drew in as a sense to explore by. Same as before, same as ever, starkly etched into second nature by long practice, first he found focus, then chased after fire. Just enough from within himself to work as tinder — perhaps enough to prove there was still some ember burning there. All the rest, he’d always been taught, was a matter of fuel.

Clever Firecalling had little enough to do with flame itself. Flame is only what happens when something burns. Clever Firecalling is about kindling, coaxing — persuading something to burn, or else something already burning to burn a particular way.

He could have lit a fire and drawn from its heat. That would have been easier, but it wouldn’t have proved the same point. That even slow and sad and fogged over, there were still things worth doing and ways he could do them. Simra whispered a calling into his cupped right hand and then brought it stinging-close to the hot glowing padlock. He urged the iron to burn. No flames this time. Just seething air-hazy heat. There was a release in that. A sweetness. Letting him know just how much he had gathered up and held back inside himself before letting it loose.

The hardwood around the padlock singed. Curling hairlines of smoke rose up from where wood and metal touched. The balmy scent of the wax that coated it came moments later. Pleasant, perfumey in the nose, but catching and fighting in Simra’s throat.

“You’re sounding like Shora,” Kjeld said slowly. “Shora’s who you sound like…”

He snatched back Simra’s attention, even while he tried to keep his eyes down, focusing on the lock. Simra pretended indifference, bringing out his spearhead and jamming it into the lock’s looped fastening. He twisted and pulled, levering with the spearhead’s long point as the bright-red loop of metal bent and warped.

“Every time I got so much as a splinter, or hit a thumb while I was working wood, she’d harp on. ‘Is it very bad? Are you going to die?’”

Simra’s tongue pricked out at the corner of his mouth. His brow creased into a frown. A knife under the ribs was hardly the same as a hammered thumb or a splintered palm. And Shora was old enough to know even they weren’t grave enough to be worth the asking. Like Kjeld remembered her as more a child than she was.

“How bout this splinter then?” Simra asked through clenched teeth and barely parted lips. “What’s your answer now?”

“The same as it ever was to her, I suppose. Am I going to die? I don’t intend to. Is it killing me? Not if I can help it.”

Simra’s own arrow-wound stung as he tensed the whole trapeze of his shoulder, twisting and prying at the metal. He drew away his spearhead a moment and asked another rush of heat into the iron lock. Its flush paled from red to orange. Another calling, another breath, and it lanced towards a sulfurous yellow. “Promise?” he asked, half-mocking.

“Simra…” Kjeld warned. “D’you ever look at yourself and see just how much of a sour shite you can be?” His voice wasn’t angry so much as tired.

Simra bristled. A snarl stirred up inside him but he turned it inward, bringing back his spearhead’s point to the lock again. He levered and twisted. Remembered how Soraya would have been able to tease it open with just the pouch of pries and tweezers and blank keys she kept at her waist. Hissed through his flaring nostrils. He pulled, and the lock pulled, and then pulled clean away — more like hot wax bending than snapping metal.

“D’you ever think how much easier it’d be to just be honest with me? Honest with yourself?” Simra snapped, finally looking up, grip tight round the spearhead. “Cos it’s like we’re talking different tongues here. More different every day! And ghosts and bones, Kjeld, fuck knows I can’t understand you sometimes, and I’m pretty sure you don’t understand me…”

How could he? It wasn’t sourness. It was all Simra could do to talk at all — to carry on with anything. If the tone was wrong then he couldn’t help it. Not when he was fighting every step of the way. Kjeld didn’t get it, just as Gitur hadn’t, just as Simra himself sometimes couldn’t.

“Simra…”

“Sorry.”

“Simra, I’m sorry…”

“I’m sorry, Kjeld. I shouldn’t—…”

“It’s alright…You’re alright…”

There was no use trying to explain. Like the words were wadded and mired with too much shame, too oily with guilt to even attempt. And what would he say? That he was just sad. That sometimes it just happened. Stupid. Feeble when he tried to so much as think it through himself. Simra felt heat prickling wet behind his eyes, stinging at their corners. He turned his face away.

“I promised her, Simra. Don’t know that you know just what that means but… Isn’t that enough? Knowing I promised her?” Kjeld’s voice was soft now. Like the wind over young grass. More like his singing voice than anything else.

Simra nodded once. And carried on nodding, not looking as he opened the lid of the box, carrying on and carrying on. Perhaps not because he agreed, but because it closed up the need for anymore words. He was afraid of the things he’d say, and of the things he’d find himself unable to say. He was afraid.

But he rifled through the contents of the box all the same, pawing one-handed. Through scrolls of parchment, buckled and curled with humidity. Through scraps of paper, half-mulched with damp. Through tablets of clay til he touched lacquered wood, smooth glass, cold metal…


	54. Chapter 54

_Kjeld walks with an uneasy lope now. Like every step is a calculated thing. Fall as far as he can before catching himself. But he spent the afternoon amongst the jetties. Wincing, even trying to wade, as he gathered in the ropes and tethers of the buoys and empty moorings, piling up dripping lengths of rope on the lake’s muddy bank._

_I watched a little from the shade of the birch-tree at the heart of the hamlet. By my side, the lockbox I’d broken into, its belly stuffed with mildewed parchment, a mulch of rot at its bottom. But in amongst all that: treasure._

_A little pouch of mouldered velvet, with a silver-threaded drawstring, counters of smooth blue ceramic and off-white ivory inside, all etched with sigils, a different one on each face. A battered leather box housing the remains of a writing kit: dried-up ink bottle, crusted closed; a pair of metal-nibbed dip-pens, one still worth using. A length of dark metal — steel or tin maybe. A thick book bound in articulated slats of wood, a kind of woven belt buckled round it to keep the parchment pages flat in damp weather: ‘Breathing Water, & Other Essays Upon The School of Alteration, As Illustrated By Diverse Anecdotes, Some Real & Others Hypothetical Or Fanciful.’_

_So I’ve sat with the book open on my lap, reading._

_Title and text are in an old and scholar-stuffy sounding version of Tamrielic. That is, ‘classic’ Tamrielic – heartland Tamrielic – the Cyrod root of all the subtly-shifting trade-tongues spoken and understood across the continent. What might be called the ‘true’ tongue of the Empire — if the Empire itself wasn’t so quick to claim that the truth of the Empire isn’t singular but many. Compound and composite. We are all ‘Imperial,’ or so the claim runs. The tongues we all speak to understand and be understood are the tongues of the Empire. Though I doubt Kitlun, for instance, would agree._

_The point is that I can read it. My mother taught me the letters and exposure taught me the language. And I’m glad of that. But reading’s not the same as understanding. Half the book, I reckon, is stodgy tracts on magic written in a style meant specially to turn the likes of me away at the door. Obscure. Opaque. Thick and winding and heavy-handed, referencing other texts in some grand presumed library. But the other half is good. Stories, as the title suggests, illustrating the pragmatics of all this. And even through the grey it’s enough to get me curious. Hungry to teach myself._

_But there’s also a message written into the frontmost leaf._

_“To my dear maestra Carinata Ennodorus on your graduation. Thanks be to Julianos that in every class of dullards there is a star as bright as you. From Apprentice to Journeyman, and from there on the gods only know! We expect great things from you, my dear, but until then I, who was once your teacher and am now your peer, am yours faithfully, Nizhonus Olbytlentian, Magician-Ordaprima and Demi-Lector in Alteration of the College Sympanelta, Arcane University, 3E 432.”_

_Guild magic, then. Ancient, and yet here in a hut in the Rift somehow. In my hands it feels by turns secret, stolen, and sordid — pleasure, then a prick of guilt._

 

The metal was neither warm nor cold and took no heat from Simra’s hand. No matter how long he held it, it stayed faintly cool to the touch. If he stilled his senses and tried to focus, there was something else too: a restless crawl of feeling. In the blue-grey twisted length of metal, or in his skin when he held it in his hand? Impossible to tell. Both perhaps. And on the back of his tongue a taste like ozone and hot iron grew the longer he tried to figure that feeling.

It looked at first like a strange sort of knife. A long and edgeless shiv, texture twisting round and round, spiralling towards the tip, like a drill or the ivory spike on a horned whale’s head. It ended in a crooked skinny length of what might’ve been a grip, criss-crossed with old red cloth, faded to a fragile pink by time, finishing with a pommelish lump. But the tip was barely sharp. Didn’t seem like it would hold a point or bear the force of a thrust. And it carried the prickle and tang of enchantment. A wand then, Simra reckoned, found in the same locked box as a book on magic.

That was as far as he’d got with it. The old familiar sense that here was something – a power; a mystery – only to find it was barred from him. Like his mother halting her teaching every time Simra started to taste what could be. Though she knew her own small share of enchantments, she’d never taught him any for himself.

Simra had tried poking at it, stroking at it. Had tried pointing it at a man-shaped painting on one of the hut-walls and willing into it with urging thoughts and focused eyes. He had tried to force magicka from his own body into it but found that the power wouldn’t flow. Like the wand was sealed tight – full – rejecting anything else that tried to seep into it.

Kissing his teeth, scowling, Simra tossed the length of metal back into the open lockbox and stood from his squat. With a foot he closed the box’s lid and shunted it into the doorway of the hut he’d claimed as his.

It was morning but later towards noon than Simra wanted to admit. The sun was clambering high, and higher with every moment he wasted. Filled with long shadows at dawn and dusk, the hamlet was bare and shadeless now, bleached hot and squinting-bright by the pale glaring sun of a Skyrim Summer.

Simra ducked into the cool dark of his hut and rummaged at the workbench where he’d strewn his saddlebags, gathersack, and satchel. He found a pen, fixings for ink, and his journal. Tucking the book under his good arm, he carried them out to the birch tree. Settled and sat cross-legged against its papery trunk, Simra fluttered through the leaves of his journal. Notes, recipes, the few spells he knew. Sketches of people and places, thoughts and feelings, rendered in words. He found his place and began to write.

 

_Third day of this pause in our progress._

_Kjeld’s spent all morning looking like he means to settle here for good. Out amongst the fallowed and overgrown fields and gardens that surround the hamlet, bending here and there like he’s picking carrots, rooting for potatoes. Instead he’s got rounds and rounds of rope spooled about his shoulders, and he’s sowing it. Leagues of it, looks like. Sailor-spliced together, end to end into one unified mongrel length. Pegging it down with yokes of wood in a perimeter round the hamlet, hidden beneath the long grass._

_I called to him from under the birch tree, where I sat in the sun, squinting at his work. Asked what he was doing — what it was for. And he only straightened, mopped his brow with a wad of ragcloth, and said he was making himself useful. Making the most of the time. Whether we’re ready to leave tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that – he said – we’d best be safe as we can be while we’re yet stayed put._

_For all he was so keen to get gone and back to Shora nearly a week back when we left Kitlun’s hall in the mountains, this change is a strange one. Weird and causeless as weather. It’s fear maybe. Or the halt of a man with a task so huge ahead of him that he doesn’t know where to start — a man who waits, hoping that a way forward will come some time and just fall on him, like rain, or like dawn…_

_The ropes, he looked up again to tell me, will trip horses coming at anything less than a full run. More likely still, given the ambling tolt that Rift ponies favour over most distances. But he’s also spooled the lines taut through a hole in a wall and back into one of the huts, where a baby’s mobile hangs discarded. He’s hung clay bottles and dry wood from the mobile too, so it rocks and clanks, chimes and jangles with any thrum that goes through the wire. Some warning’s better than none, he said._

_In the same way, maybe I ought to take up the trick my mother taught me as we walked the long way back through Eastmarch to Windhelm. Of sleeping with a stone in your hand and a basin or kettle beneath it, so that any sound that jolts your grip will loose the pebble and send the pot ringing like a bell to wake you. Raiding season draws on, after all, and neither of us are fit to defend ourselves any way other than running…_

 

Simra looked up and out across the grasses again. Somewhere in amongst the weeds and overgrowth yesterday he’d found the remains of a herb garden still growing, and seasoned that evening’s stew of smoked mutton, parsnips, onions with bay, marjoram, canis leaves. If maybe he’d found creeproot growing here, like in the saltflats of Eastmarch, he could’ve chewed it — might’ve helped him think, sharpened his mind. But all he had now was the sluggish sun as it tended towards evening. The side-fastening collar of his undyed Eastmarcher’s tunic, itching warm at his neck. The shimmering veils of heat that danced lingering above the lake and on the plains…

“Wait…” he murmured. Something was coming together behind his eyes. “Wait wait wait, shut up, shut up just one second!” Simra hissed to himself, raising a hand to paw down his face, press and stroke at his cheek and jaw. He needed to think. Remember. “Got it, I’ve fuckin’ got it..!”

Maybe. Maybe.

Simra lurched up from under the tree and into the mage’s hut again. The shadows were deeper now, thick as ink in the building’s corners. Leaving his journal and writing kit on the benchtop, Simra called a cold-red magelight with a cup-and-flick of his hand, then toed open the lockbox once more.

Anticipation made his fingers clumsy. They shook as he wrung his hands together, right over where the left lay slung and splinted against his chest. He slipped the six-faced pewter ring off his left hand and onto his right. Looked into the box, contents bathed in a red-eyed glow. And he reached inside.

It was faint at first. A kind of hum. But when he took the wand in his hand, it all but hurt. The ring buzzed against his skin with an audible whine. Like the wings of a wasp trapped in a glass jar — an almost-angry sound. It was reacting to the prickle and hum of the wand’s enchantment. Reckoning, recognising, amplifying it.

Hard to hold it for too long, Simra dropped the length of metal onto the workbench, there with his journal, his pens, his ink. An eager hitch crowded his breathing. The sound of his heart had turned drum-tight, echoing in his head. Progress — two mysteries unravelled with a single solution.

He slipped off the ring once more and held it like a glass up to his eye. Through it, the world had that same heat-haze waver he remembered from when he’d first dug it up. But the wand was bright, glittering livid with threads and chases of light and sparks. Between the criss-crossed wraps of its crooked handle, a precise sequence of runes now gleamed blue-green. Three, in series: two below, closest to what would’ve been the blade if it was a dagger, and one above, closest to the pommel that wasn’t a pommel.

Simra worried his left arm out of its sling, wincing, to hold the ring up to his left eye. With his right hand he reached out to stroke the sigils, one after the other. They prickled against his fingertips. When he lowered the ring from his eye, they were still there — still glowing.

“Now we’re getting somewhere…”

He slung his arm once more, crammed the ring back onto his left hand and snatched up the wand in his right. Moments later he was outside again, fidgetting and contorting the long fingers of his hand round the wand’s grip. There was a way of having all the runes under a fingertip when he held it. Surely. He just needed to figure it out.

Eventually he stood in the glow of his magelight, cold-red against the soft warm orange of the sunset, rooted to the same spot he’d stood in for most of the day. A half-dozen paces ahead of him was the hut he’d looked at and willed the wand to work. The man-shaped painting mocked him, daubed on its side. His fingers settled into shape. Index and middle fingertips against the first two runes, and thumb counter-braced against the last, it was more comfortable than first he’d thought. More natural.

“Moment of truth…”

Simra touched his fingertips to the runes in that order. Nothing. Then the same order, but reversed. Still nothing, and the same again for either-which way with the middle rune pressed first.

“Oh fucking come on!” He snarled, gritting his teeth. “Don’t you dare stumble at the last fuckin’ stride, come on!”

He clenched his fingers tight round every rune. Scowling, he gestured with the wand, thrusting it forwards. Something seemed to blossom from that. A calm and promising hum rose up against his thumb, like the wand was finally coming awake and readying itself. A fraction of a moment later there was a jolt. A kind of connection between his two foremost fingers. And where the wand had resisted any searching push of magicka before, now it yanked, snatching at something inside of him. Not taking anything, but flowing all through him, linking the two runes as if he’d been the break in its circuit, completing it.

There was a twisting flicker. Not light but a warping twist in his vision, like suddenly seeing the wand’s wavering tip through an imperfect mirror. The flicker gathered and leapt out. A bolt, a beam, a cresting wave in the air. The sound it made was hardly a sound at all — a low reverberant burr of noise, like a deep silence reorganising itself. Simra’s wrist snapped back with the force of it, unprepared and unbraced. It ached, jerked like that. But he didn’t look away.

The bolt of writhing force met the painted man with a noise like two saws trying to cut one another. A high-pitched many-toothed creaking. Then there was a twist. Paint, plaster, the stone beneath – everything in a palmswidth of the impact – all warped and mangled together into a tight whirl, like a wet cloth being wrung dry. Unreal, impossible, seeing solid matter marled together like that, in a single snarl of force.

“Ghosts and bones…” Simra breathed.

Then the whole empty hut cried out. Groaned. One part of the mangled drystone wall shuddered. Then nightmarish-slow, like something dissolving, the building fell, roaring, crumbling under its own weight as the pattern of its support gave in.

Simra’s shoulders heaved. His breath came panting and starting. His right arm and the wand in his hand hung loose and heavy by his side.

A yelp of mingled horror and triumph echoed across the plain, across the lake, all bathed by the sunset in the baker’s-dozen colours of burning.


	55. Chapter 55

Windchimes in the morning mist. Hazy and still more than half asleep, Simra turned over in his bedroll. Windchimes of wood and glass, tinning little bells hung in his row of the Rigs. Like waking up at home and hearing the whole Quarter start to move, making ready for dawn. For a moment his head and heart were back on Chiming Row in the Windhelm Grey Quarter. Another moment, and he was sure the sounds were dream-carried things — unreal in the world between waking and sleep; walled off from the world at hand.

Then he heard the screams of horses. Men’s voices, raised to shouting. Simra thrashed out from inside his bedroll, limbs in blind disarray. His body was clumsy and stiff, not yet properly known to itself. His eyes could see but failed to make sense of things. The gloom of the hut he’d claimed as his. The things he’d strewn it with to make it in small ways his own. The figure filling the doorway, dark against the white-grey fog outside.

Simra tried to scream but found his voice was thin and dry. The figure rushed forward, fell upon him — and then they were helping him to his feet.

“Simra!” Kjeld hissed. “Wake up, Sim, get up! We need to go. We need to run.”

Simra scrambled round the hut, nodding fast enough that his neck hurt. He understood. He started to bundle up his bedroll.

“No time for that! Not now. Now we need to go. They’ve come back. We need to run, Simra!” Kjeld’s eyes had taken on that familiar terror. A cornered beast desperation, struggling to get free, like any risk and any sacrifice was worth that chance at safety.

A whimper ripped up from Simra’s throat, keening high with frustration, fear. There were things he couldn’t leave behind. He scrabbled half into his aketon, one-sleeved, and tied on his makeshift swordbelt.

The shouts were closer now.

“Leave it!” said Kjeld.

But Simra was already leaving too much. Things he couldn’t afford to lose. It was a raking in his stomach – a sick and stabbing emptiness – twined right now but surging and stinging, ready to fork outward. Into rage or panic. Either or both. Where was the difference anymore? In both cases, he was breaking apart.

“Get the horses.” The words were thick and difficult on Simra’s sleep-stiff tongue. He shouldered his satchel, slung his gathersack.

“We need to go,” Kjeld repeated. In his voice that same faltering difference between anger and horror quivered. “We need to run!”

“So get the fucking horses!”

A whoop sounded from out in the fields. A shrieking response came back a fractured second later. The call went up, spreading round the hamlet, echoing across its perimeter.

Kjeld rounded back to the door, hurrying away. He muttered as he went. “Mara Motherbear, watch us… Kyne Kiss-at-the-End, please, guide us…”

Simra was thinking. Too hard and too fast to think clearly. How his boots were nowhere to be seen and would take too long to put on. How he couldn’t carry his saddlebags and still keep a hand free to fend off, fight, do what might need doing. “Cursed…” he hissed to himself. “Cursed by the stars, cursed by the Princes, wraithbitten, caulblind…cursed..!” The words tailed off into a grit-jawed snarl. Things were falling apart.

Simra’s hands trembled. He rushed over to the workbench and stuffed his journal into the satchel strapped at his side. He flung his goatskin mantle around his shoulders. No time to brooch it, he held it in place with his splint-stuck left hand, dragged and tucked it under the straps of his bags. His palms were sweating. His hair felt crawlish, unclean on his scalp. Snatching up the wand from the worktop – knowing it was a safer defence than his sword now, wounded as he was – Simra readied it with a thumb, brandished it in his right hand, and left the hut.

Just like on the walls before the hall they’d fought to defend. The same Riftfolk war-calls in the same woollen off-white mist, all too familiar for anything but gnawing fear. Simra tried to look everywhere at once. Watched his back, watched the way ahead, neck stinging as he cast about his searching eyes. There were figures in the mist. Dark hair and embroidered coats. A horse that stood and stamped, a rider on its back carrying a long tassel-tipped spear. Simra fled through the hamlet, between the huts, breaking towards the outhouses at its edge.

“Sim!”

On the hem of a fisherman’s hut, Kjeld held the reins of both their ponies, champing uneasy and troughing the ground with their hooves. In the midst of his run Simra cut into a turn, all skidding feet and one flailing arm for balance. He spun towards Kjeld’s voice and away from the others. But the sounds were closer now.

Animal calls mangled by the throats of men and women. Whoops and cries behind Simra’s head, one like a shrill mock copy of a horse’s pained shriek. Something whispered past him on the air. A dark streak. And then Kjeld’s dun pony was rearing, taking up that shriek for its own, an arrow bristling from its shoulder.

Kjeld backed up, letting go its reins. Grimacing, he yanked Simra’s russet and white-spotted mare into shelter behind the hut as she tried to shy and run.

Simra staggered a half-circle, aketon whipping like a half-cloak at his one sleeved shoulder as he straightened his right arm. His fingers found the runes and pressed. An instant of power surged through him. The outstretched wand jerked and the air around it groaned, rippling. Shouts and yelps of alarm broke out, but Simra had already turned ahead, running full tilt once more. No chance to see if the bolt had struck home. Instead he saw Kjeld’s horse bolt away in a limping stumbling gallop. Instead, mind full of unseen arrows piercing phantom pains into his back, Simra skewed around the corner and into the hut wall’s cover.

The mare was still shaking her head. Her hindquarters dodged and skittered, bucking at nothing, pulling away from the reins in Kjeld’s hand. The Nord’s eyes were just as wild as hers, his teeth just as bared while he strained to bring her in line.

How long could their safety last? They were being hunted down. Searched out. Simra walled up the terror gnawing and teeming inside him and couched the wand flat against his palm. Hand out to the mare, he reached for her flank, her neck. The motion was an old familiar thing by now – his hand on her side, his voice cooing awkward – and through all the fear that reeked around them, she seemed to remember it. She seemed to remember him for all she’d forgotten everything but the urge to run.

“Just the one?” Simra said, softly. Words meant for Kjeld, gentle sounds meant for the horse.

Kjeld jutted out his chin and jerked his head to the way the other horse had fled. One was their only option. “Mount up.”

“You’re gonna get on behind me?”

Wordless, Kjeld passed Simra the reins.

“You’ll get on behind me, right?”

“We’re not dying here,” rasped Kjeld. “Course I’m getting on behind you.”

The mare was bare-backed again. No time to saddle and stirrup her, and one-armed, Simra couldn’t scramble onto her back unaided. Kjeld bent at the knee, cupping his hands into a step for Simra. A clamber, a heave, and Simra hitched his leg over. The mare teetered, worrying to one side and pulling at the reins with her bit. But Simra’s legs were already locked, angled tight round her torso. She pitched and shied out of nerves now more than rebellion.

“Shit shit shit shit…” Simra swore, cramming the wand into his calfwraps. “Shit!” Kjeld sprang aback, vaulting up behind him, arms tight round Simra’s waist. “Shit!” In shock the mare surged forward, unwieldy under them both in her haste.

The sheathed clatter of sword on thigh, slapping in rhythm to the horse’s gait. The blurring misty flatness of the broad brown lake on their left. The pang of Simra’s legs, already starting to cramp and ache. The foaming bruising speed of the mare beneath him, urging into and holding a sprinting speed she was unused to. And Simra was used to riding at least with a looped rope for stirrups. And she was used to just the one rider. Things split and colours ran in Simra’s eyes and ears and mind. That sick fever-pitch of racing thoughts and thoughtlessness. Could it really be called battle-blood when it came to help him flee?

An arrow stung the air an arm’s length away. Simra saw it flicker off ahead, drop, and puncture the ground in their path. Like a milestone they passed it by. Kjeld was saying something, but the wind stole its sound.

“What!?”

“I said they’re giving chase!” Kjeld barked above the noising breeze.

“Fuck…fuck fuck fuck, bad, this is fucking—… How many?”

A pause sped past in silence. Kjeld’s arms changed grip on Simra’s waist as the Nord turned to look round. “Five maybe! Mounted! One with a bow!”

Simra let go a strangled wail through the thin seams of his gritted teeth. His jaw ached. He hunkered into the mare’s thick neck, gathered the reins tighter, felt her coarse mane between his fingers. “What d’we do!”

“Slow down!”

“Fuck d’you mean slow down!?”

“They rode here! We’ve got the fresher mount but you’re pissing that ‘vantage away like this!”

“Why me? Why’ve I got the reins? I dunno shit!”

“She’s your blasted horse!” Kjeld said, voice dry and breathless from shouting. “You fucking calmed her before, so slow her down and we’ll outpace them!”

“Y’wanna outpace arrows too?! Fuck, Kjeld! Shit..!”

Simra couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make himself slow their pace. The terror was singing all through him and wouldn’t quiet enough for an inch of slack or ounce of calm. Even looking back was more than he could do. There were hooting clamouring calls behind them. Earshot was too much. Too close. Simra wanted them gone.

Another arrow tested the air, closer this time. He must’ve done something to the reins – something with his heels – as the mare angled tightly off to one side, away from the banks of the lake and onto more open ground, harder underfoot.

Kjeld was still yelping something. Rasping something. A cloying wet gathered at Simra’s back, hot in the cold midst of sweat that soaked his shirt. But Simra was wild-eyed, hard-faced. He’d sunk into some animal skullspace, more like the horse beneath him than himself now. There was shock, warning, a pitch of anger in Kjeld’s voice, but tone was all Simra could tell. The words were garbled and senseless to him.

Hammering across the plain, cresting the sea of short grass, the sun had come up and begun to boil the mist to nothing. Warm the air, shuddering, simmering. Discomfort groped at Simra’s thoughts. The ants-nest crawl of sweat and heat on his skin. The punishing stammer of their pace, the horse’s bones, the bones of his hips. Like his body was lading and dousing his mind, forcing him to feel everything, desperate to block out what screeched and whimpered in the distance. The pain of his legs, the pain of the grinding bones in his arm, the pain of his still-healing neck and shoulder. Irrelevant.

A dark stained gristled the horizon. They drummed towards it across the lowlands. It grew into a snarly coppice of overgrown bushes, stunted mean and grope-limbed trees. Simra spurred with his heels, gouging speed from the lathered sides of his mare. By the arms at his middle he felt bound and constricted. By the sky and the chasing sound at his back, he felt exposed. The woods promised protection. Tight spaces and shadows. A place to flee to and not just flight to save them. One horse could clip through the snare of the trees but five would be broken up, forced to split or slow to regroup.

They broke into the woodline. Kjeld’s voice was breathless but sounded hopeful. And Simra’s heart was crowing. He could lose them. Save them both. Not long now. Only hang on a little longer.

But he was remembering. Things had begun to weave and overlay. The branches round him were scaffolds, every trunk a strut or straight-up support in the wooden thicket of the Rigs. And he was running, fleeing, but from who? The Barsatims? A baying hoard of whooping Grey Quarter gangers, hounding him like a fox through the forest of rickety wood, hanging cloth, ill-carved stone? And the closest pursuer he had was panic. It snapped at his heels, urging him, daring him: give in, falter, one mistake is all it’ll take.

Like a kind of busy swarming blindness. He saw past and present at once so neither made sense. There was blood on his face. He searched in animal terror for shelter – somewhere to be small; shake the ones chasing him; hide from them – and instead he found this. End after end after dead end. Horse rearing and pitching beneath him, between the solid breakpaces of trees and brush. Clawed branches picking at him. Like vultures already. Like buzzards and crows. Foxes tearing at his clothes, digging up his bones. Run. He’d outrun it all.

Then a hanging moment broke his stride. Things tipped and spun. The air was hot and frantically open. He was weightless, forward-flung, like jumping — a leap into empty space. No time to scream before the breath was beaten from him by the ground below. Simra’s body tangled and crashed, rolling over and over itself til something broke his tumble.

Thick and pain-dazed vision. He strained and tried to get up. The horse had tripped. Some root or tulge; some trap in the wood’s ground. Sunlight streamed in pillars and shafts through the forest ceiling. Leaves, backlit and gleaming. Leaves the colour of coinage. Dust rose where the mare thrashed and cried. She and Simra both tried to rise. He lurched bruised and panting to his feet, hurting all over but able to stand. Her ankle gave way. She fell again to a raging heap of limbs, red-brown coat, sour-milk spots. There was a body near her, beneath her. Red hair and red beard, still moving, reaching forward, crawling onward.

A plea blurred to life on Kjeld’s lips. Blood shone bright around his mouth. Simra couldn’t hear the words through the deaf piercing chime that filled his mind. But he could read the words from here, pulse by pulse as Kjeld reached out to him, hand gleaming red.

Please. Please don’t. Please.

Simra’s heartbeat was a blaring drone. His hands hurt, rubbed raw. Behind his eyes, Simra saw Moridene fall again. Behind the threshing suffering pony – behind where Kjeld crawled, struggling for breath and bleeding, unable to stand – there were riders moving among the trees. Gaining.

He wasn’t dying here. One thought ate up all the rest.

And Simra ran.


	56. Chapter 56

A shroud of smoke seethed out from the forest. Beneath the pall of it, solid and charcoal-black, whatever still burnt was hidden now. But still the eye-stinging stench of fire was woven profuse through the air, riding the same breeze that set the smoke dancing. More hung on his clothes, in his hair, soaking him with that acrid heady reek.

Simra rubbed at his face, knuckled the sockets of his sore eyes. His hands came away smeared with soot. Kneeling on a shallow rise of hillside, he wrapped his arms round himself, and looked out over the snarl of trees.

Like when he’d started that fen-fire and set a swathe of Eastmarch burning. Only now it wasn’t the tar and peat of the ground that burnt. Trees and bushes this time, and thickets of thorns — the living land. He didn’t remember calling the flames that began it. Didn’t remember getting away, leaving the copse. He’d run and that was all, and all the rest was absence. But the sight, the smoke, the smell were all too familiar not to be his fault.

“That’s your grief. There. That’s what it looks like…” Simra knew that well enough by now. “Scorched earth… Smoke and soot and ash… Things going to shit.” The same for his fear, the wretched snap of his anger: the last snarling blaze of power when he grasped how powerless he was.

His voice was threadbare, every word snatched between yelping hiccoughs, gasps for breath that wouldn’t come back. His eyes were streaming, washing swathes through the smudge and grime of his face. The blame might’ve been on the smoke, if not for the shudders that wracked him. Sobs so violent they felt like retching. He couldn’t stop.

“Pull it together…” Soraya’s voice sneered in his head. Think crying’ll fix it? Crying doesn’t fix shit.

But he was alone now. No-one around to see him anymore, or to hear the words he whispered to himself. Crying wouldn’t fill his gathersack with food, or put shoes back on his feet, or fetch him back his bedroll. Crying wouldn’t stop him starving. And crying wouldn’t undo what he’d done — wouldn’t bring back Kjeld. But it all hurt too much not to. He was crying because it hurt.

No motion on the hillside and no motion at the treeline below. Only the slow billow and banner of smoke, chewing through all the things he’d set ablaze to cover his escape. The whole of his body was one bruise, harshly reproachful, too tender for a while to move. He’d lost his sling. The splinted weight of his left arm hung crude across his lap. A small miracle it hadn’t broken all over again. But not a mercy. There was none of that for the having — not for a long time now.

At some point, Simra fell silent. Slowly his body went still. Only the knot of nausea in his stomach remained. And the pain that brewed in his bones, scored his skin, and ached in every muscle.

Unshod, with only grubby wraps on his feet – hungry, with only the sick wane of the battle-blood sharp as bile in his belly – Simra got up and carried on alone.

With the smoke at his back, the day broke full into a broad bright morning. Beneath his feet the grass was warm.

He’d ridden since sunrise, then run through the woods. Walking now was more than he could bear but no less than he deserved. He was tired and battered. A ragged figure cutting an ill-kempt path along the hillside’s shallow-sloping flank, his path serrated back and forth, one minute climbing, the next heading downward. Was it better to make for higher ground or back toward the lakeside and the plain? The answer changed with each painful step.

Simra found he was murmuring to himself. The words of Clovis’ mantra had become a habit, brought on by pain, and natural now as flinching away from the source of some new hurt. He still didn’t know what the words meant. Only that they were older than most Altmer, not quite poetry and not quite song. Only that they had to do with the proper rhythms of the body. A rondel to turn the mind round on and set the body right. But for all he spoke the words they came up empty. When he reached inside himself, he dredged and the reach came dry. All the magicka inside him, he’d burnt up while he ran. But the memories of how were a blur at best, and at worst a blankness. Like the magic had burnt them too.

“Pointless…” he spat. His voice was still raw from crying. Worse than simple sobbing might make it. Like he’d screamed himself hoarse — couldn’t recall when, but the why at least was clear enough… “No fucking point…”

Same as the magic that ought to’ve fuelled it, the words of the mantra tailed off into silence. Instead Simra busied his hands. Clumsy with disuse, the fingers of his left hand closed about his right wrist. Slowly, round and round, they spooled the bright smooth beads he wore there. Like a Cyrod praying to the Eight. Like a scriv counting on an abacus. Every stride he took. Every trying and tender stride.

The day drew on. Sunlight prickled on Simra’s face, making the blood and dirt and dried sweat crawl on his cheeks and brow. He flapped a hand, touched it to his skin, like he was shooing off whatever insects might’ve dared to land. But it was only the coating of grime that clung to him.

Past midday and his stomach clenched hungry. Another emptiness inside him, painful as all the rest. Simra looked round, a halfhearted effort at foraging with his eyes. There were only the coppery banks of rock that ledged along the hillside. The stubborn growth of grass, short up here where the soil was thin and only weeds could flourish. The distant golden gleam of the lake, shapeless and shimmering, blotted dim in its middle by what might’ve been an island. Beyond and all around that, a flat and scarce vastness of plains.

He had kept on upwards. Found himself clambering along a sparred out knuckle of stone, stepping up and up its rough shapes and breaks like a long flight of stairs. Best to get up high, he reckoned, and find a point of vantage. They’d been heading to Riften. What else was there to do but carry on?

“Stop…” Simra panted. “That’s all…”

Sword clapping against one thigh, satchel against the other, he reeled onto a narrow cleft of rock. Moss gathered soft in its cracks like verdigris on copper. Like the green inside of the wire bracelet on his left wrist. At first he stayed on his knees. Then he slumped to a sit. He couldn’t get up. Couldn’t go on. Not today.

The afternoon was dry around him. The air felt thin and shot through with lines that twined and tugged and itched at him. In the western sky the sun loomed large and slack as a dead man’s eye. Simra heaved his feet over the rocky shelf’s edge and let his legs hang down below. At first he looked without seeing. His open eyes faced the lake and the view ahead. Slowly he focused and drew details from the map of shadow and colour, flat as pigments painted on plaster.

A line of road meandered across the plain. It lost itself between clots of woodland, but found its way once more in a path towards the lake. From here Simra could see boats, speckled adrift on the glassy water. A burr of dark shapes clung to the lake’s far eastern side. From there a kind of darkness bristled and grew, solid across the land til Simra’s vision hazed with the distance.

He lost himself in looking. Shadows lengthened across the land. As they stretched, Simra felt it again. He had stopped. No more running. They had caught him up and there was no flight left in him. This time no tears would come. No outward signs to show, except the huddle and hunch of his shoulders, the deep-dug lines in his dirt-smeared still-young face. Through the hunger, his gut found something to fill it. Leaden-heavy, a weight of guilt, grim and numb beneath all the ways his body had invented to hurt him and carry on hurting.

“…Fuck was I supposed to do?” Simra hissed. His hand fumbled at his belt and brought up the waterskin Siska had made for him. At least he still had that, and a slack volume of water to slake his dry voice. “Nothing I could do..!” He drank, wishing he had anything other than water to wash down the words.

But the words were lies. Dust on his stiff wooden tongue. He knew that before the lie was complete. He could have stayed. Perhaps he could have fought them off. A blade-thin chance but a chance still that maybe he could’ve saved them both — like he’d turned back a three-horse charge, unarmed and unaided, on open ground as he hauled Moridene to safety. Like he’d saved Moridene… But neither time felt like a choice he’d made. Just the tug of what had to be. Like he’d let slip the reins of things and let them run on as they always would have, no matter what he did or wanted. And that was no comfort. Worse, even.

“Helpless, useless, pointless…”

His teeth gritted. The guilt turned caustic to anger. A restless motion writhed in his body, scraping his heels against the rocky ledge, sinking his grubby fingernails into the burn-tough skin of his palms. “Stupid…” He smacked the rigid heel of his palm into his forehead and pulled his fingers hard through his hair, wanting it to hurt. “Stupid. Stupid.” This time he jabbed with his knuckles. Sent them stinging against his skull, bruising his hand first against bone, then jouncing them against his temple. Two strikes and his vision turned to stars. His ears rang. And for a short time, his thoughts dissolved to colours and noise.

What if he fell? A simple tilt of his weight, angling his balance over the edge…

But he was too afraid. Now as then, a choice between life and death was no choice at all. Pain was the price he’d paid to carry on living. And all trade is based, some way or another, on loss. He deserved the hurt. He deserved the guilt. It was Kjeld that deserved better than what the world had given him.

Simra took out his journal and pens. With steady hands he began to mix ink for writing.

 

_They came in the vague dawn. Others, nameless and faceless. Raiders perhaps, or the hamlet’s inhabitants, returned to find their homes turned to shells — their crops burnt and livestock stolen or fled. All I know of their purpose or intentions is that they came with swords and spears, a bow strung ready to shoot._

_There could be no stand made against them. No fight we could give them that wouldn’t end against us. We ran because we had no choice. Left things behind that we would rather have kept. One horse bolted in the panic of their coming. The other we rode at a ragged speed, across the plains and through the morning mist._

_I made the choice to ride into a tangled woodland. Where one horse could break through the undergrowth, five would be forced to split or slow their pace to stay together. But it was in that snarl of trees and thorns that the pony who’d carried me across the Rift lost her footing. She dropped and twisted — couldn’t rise again. And between the trees we could hear them. I saw shapes making towards us, still chasing, on horseback where we stood stranded on foot._

_What came after is hard for me to say. But what needs to be written is rarely what is easy to write. And this is a story that needs to be told. Because writing’s not just a matter of recording. Writing is the stitching together and forging of truths. Something that peoples who pass on their stories by tongue alone have learnt the hard way. When memory no longer serves, what’s written is all that remains. The truth in words, writ down for the ages._

_Kjeld, who was born in the forests of Falkreath, dense and green, thick and heavy with life. Kjeld, who was a singer of songs, a teller of tales, a fount of cleverness and wisdom. Kjeld, who held me tight and pushed the barbed head of an arrow through my skin to leave the wound empty and clean. Kjeld who fought and defeated the warlord Emeseg Two-Tongued, and won the love of the carl who commanded him. Kjeld who was a friend and Kjeld who was a father, got to his feet, turned to me, and told me:_

_“Run. Hurt as I am, there’s no out for me. I’ll hold them here and buy you time. Tell Shora—… Tell her what she needs to be told.”_

_I did as he said. He saved me. The least I can do in return is do the rest of what he asked of me._


	57. Chapter 57

Like a swimmer on their front, frog-crawling in sideward sweeps of their arms, the boat oared out across the lake. Beamy and shallow-drawn, its going was slow and smooth. Push after push of forward motion between lazy drifts, crab-catching little cuts from the oars to angle the boat through a change in its course.

Crouched at the boat’s aft, the fisherman picked tangles from his nets of hemp and woven horsehair, furled them out and cast them off to drift in the little boat’s wake. A shoal of fired clay floats followed its path, stoneware weights crawling unseen along the lakebed. The fisherman’s son was benched at the boat’s middle. A warm evening’s worth of sunlight had beaded his brow with sweat, and he worked the oars with a churly look thick-laid on his lumpen features.

Both father and son plied their trade mostly in silence. When they spoke it was in gutters and grunts. Words in Riftspeak, all pointing to some practical purpose. “Little to larboard … Have a care … A care, I said, you’re stirring up the nets!” And when they swapped words they spared none for Simra.

He crouched low in the bow as they ferried him across Lake Honnrich. No smalltalk to fret over, as if he was cargo rather than a customer, and that suited him fine.

Left hand greasy and warm, even through the small napkin of woven dried reeds, Simra held his first meal in two days. Fillets of some white and puffy-fleshed freshwater fish, dredged through oatmeal and fried darkly in half-burnt butter. There’d also been a ladleful of bright-crimson hotly spiced stew, shot through with tender divides of what might’ve been eel. But Simra had wolfed that, burning his tongue and lips and throat, before so much as leaving the shore. Now he ate the rest: more than he needed, he knew, but still less than his body wanted.

He’d bought both from the fisherman’s wife, who took the fish from the day’s previous catch, and cooked them in front of Simra as his guts writhed and clenched with the hunger he’d forced himself not to feel. Half a penny each. A second copper to the fisherman himself for passage on the day’s last outing of the nets, and a promise he’d leave Simra at the Riften docks.

The nets came in, thrashing here and there with trapped whisker-faced fish, crayshrimp frozen still with the shock of coming into the air and onto the deck. One by one, the fisherman plucked them up from the wet-woven mesh and tossed them to wait or die in wicker baskets.

“Ega – keita – harma…” he counted as he worked. “Negya – ott – hata – heit…”

By the time the catch was all numbered, Simra reckoned he could remember his way to fourteen and back in Riftspeak. Lips moving silent, he repeated the words to himself, committing them to memory. From his time with Kitlun and her clan, he’d learnt enough to get by. Laughably, maybe, in broken awkward terms and with a terrible accent, but he’d learnt quickly. Like his mother had taught him to swim, he’d found himself in deep with no recourse but to thrash and struggle his way toward progress. Proficiency, or something like it: workable, though motley and slipshod…

 

_Before the city itself came a sheen on the water. An oily slickness and furring of detritus that floated round the city’s docks, like a second sickly lake within the lake itself, with its own tiny rafts and boats adrift upon its face. Rings of buoys marked purses of netting moored beneath the surface — cramped farms for fish and shrimp, I reckoned, and ropes too for the farming of oysters._

_Then came the outskirts of Riften itself._

_Stony, cold, carved from the land and into it, Windhelm seems so solid, stable, stubborn in my memory. Ancient and built to grow older still for countless ages onward. But Riften is young, growing outward, lively and uncontrollable as weeds. A wild tangle of wood, Riften thickets a heel of land that juts into the lake, then floats bristling out onto the water itself._

_The fringes of the city’s lakeside half have no walls. Just a sequence of watchtowers piled down into the lakebed, round and brick-built to a man’s height above the waterline, then carrying on up in a taper of clinker-planked timber and clay-tiled roofs. Chains and ropes reach between the towers, and more lines still spool inwards, mooring the floating parts of the city beyond._

_My small ferryboat switched from paddles to push-pole and shunted into the gabble of house-boats and shop-boats that bumped hulls and drifted idle, dozens by dozens, between pontoons, rafted walkways, floating docks. Red-painted poles strutted out from the water, marking paths like ours, kept clear for boat-traffic, but folk seemed to use them more for the hanging laundry-lines than as real reminders of the law._

_Buildings on piers and scaffolds of stilts came after that, more solid as we drew deeper in. Rope-ladders and clambers of rigging webbed their sides. Cargo cranes hung gallowish over my head._

_Even by evening, the waterways were cramped and fraught with comings and goings. Sharp trim little cutters, round stretched-hide coracles. The small fishing boat that carried me felt clumsy and huge by comparison. The fisherman and his son grumbled to each other, swore at passers-by, then crammed up against the supports of a pier and came to a stop._

_“Off,” the fisherman grunted. Fixed me with his eyes. Jabbed an upturned thumb at the netted rigging draped over the pierside._

_I was too tired to argue the issue. Didn’t have the words in Riftspeak to do so, even if I did. Weren’t we in the city now? Wasn’t that what he’d promised? I kissed my teeth quietly, gathered my bags, and scrambled out of the boat. I was raised in the Grey-Quarter. I know how to climb. Even with barely one-and-a-half hands good for gripping, I know how to climb._

_The sun set. Riften’s not so much a monolith as Windhelm, I think. Built more on the flat — fitting for a a hold that’s near wholly plains. And all this means that it’s hard to garner a sense of its size while you’re in it. Like walking through a forest, and walking and walking and finding the trees just don’t end, it’s only time and travel that proves the city’s size._

_So yes, the sun set, and I found myself walking the streets of Riften’s lakeside district, which aren’t so much streets as a series of walkways between stilt-raised halls, docks, clapboard flats of decking that lead across the roofs of lowslung boathouses that nest above the water. A creaking constant murmur of waterlogged wood. The whine of needle-faced biting insects. The humid air oppressive on my skin and between the layers of my clothes._

_My right hand went to my swordhilt. I know better than to walk through any city at night with my guard down, let alone a strange city I’ve been in less than an hour. In a fight I’d be better served by the wand I still carry, tucked in the ties that bind my calves, but the sword’s a better warning. Clots of Nords grouped on the occasional street corner, or sat with swinging feet on the odd pier or bridge. There was a time I might have hidden myself, skirted a longer route to avoid them. I would’ve been afraid. Now weariness or else hard-won experience has done away with that and mostly made me cautious. No-one spared me more than a glance._

_I found a bunkhouse. A low and long shingle-roofed hall between buildings that by their smell I reckoned must’ve been used for smoking fish. A banner stitched with a rough version of The Lord constellation twitched and creased above the entrance._

_I took another copper penny and had the owner halve it with the long-hafted hatchet he keeps at his belt. The half he kept has got me a straw-stuffed mattress for the night…_

 

For all the commonroom reeked sour with tallow candles its shadows were thicker than the flames were bright. A liquid and smoky darkness clung to everything beneath its greasy eaves. The pelt-chested hairy-armed owner had mounded himself in a chair by the door. He curled and uncurled his long dark moustaches, slowly gnawing on what looked to Simra like a raw white-purple turnip.

The other clients kept nearly all to their own company. A wretched and sickly-pale Argonian shivering in their sleep despite the evening’s Summer warmth. A tall Nord man with a long and tangled brown-gold beard paced between the beds, cricking his neck every five steps, muttering all the while as he hugged a tall Eastmarcher shield to his torso. Only a small handful of livelier guests played at knucklebones in one corner. Any words they spoke seemed loud, clothed thick in all that silence.

Simra supposed he was a strange sight, but no stranger than any of the others. An elf, grey-skinned and red-gold eyed, face marked deliberate with a small patterning of neat scars. No shoes on his grubby and rag-wrapped feet – face travel-grubby and clothes much worse – but with a sword on one hip and a journal open on his lap, pen and ink both set to work in his hands.

He thought about using a cantrip to clean himself, but thought that brief flicker of magic might undo all the inattention the others had paid him so far. Better to keep up this crowded-in kind of solitude they all maintained. It left him free to write and to listen.

Most of what he overheard was good only for honing his Riftspeak, getting an ear for the way cityfolk used it. Grumbling about the prices of leather, of grain, and crowing over the current rate per head of cattle at market. Bawdy jokes and low-level bullying. Elaborate curses over lost coin: all carrion birds and pecked-out tongues, gods-shrivelled glands and shit luck. But in amongst the local gossip were a scant few real rumours. Slowly in Simra’s mind, a picture of the city puzzled itself together.

“…knee-deep in it a month from now, put simple. I tell you, a whole half the city.”

“Well… Knee-deep in what?”

“In shit!”

“You think it’s that bad then?”

“No no no… No! For once in your life, Baltur – the first time in your life, brother – you’re groping for subtlety, but there’s none to be found.”

“Well…”

“I’m talking literally, corkhead!”

“I don’t follow…”

“Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t! … Listen, put simple, I’ll lay it out. Herdsmen and horse-humpers, hm? Outside the city walls by their hundreds. Which means horses and goats and all the trouble that comes with all that. And it means, Baltur, that in a few days I’ll stand fully unsurprised if we start to smell them even here in lakeside. And it means, Baltur, that by week’s end we’ll all be moated in by their filth — mark me there, it’s why they move round like they do. But keep them holed up in one place and—..!”

“Why though? Why’ve they come?”

“Well… I—… Put simply—…”

“The talks. The talks’ll be what’s brought them, you mark me now, Helntur.”

“Of course. Of course! The peace talks! The Northern king and whoever’ll listen to him bark. I tell you both, letting him in the city at all was the biggest mistake the speakers in the keep ever made…”

“Truly? When their choices were either that, or find themselves besieged by that stubborn bear..?”

“Well… What I mean is that…simply… Hm.”

“My turn to stand unsurprised, Helntur. You talk so much it doesn’t leave you a chance to listen. We fought a war that ‘bear’ reckoned didn’t need to be fought at all, but all the same proved to us we couldn’t have won if we tried. Not split up like we all are, bickering like foxes over the same days-dead stag. That was the point he wanted to prove all along. So he’s here and he’s unsplitting us. All the horseclans and landholders and anyone else that’s gathered? They’re the clever ones — those as want a say and a share in the new whole.”

“I’ll give you a new hole…”

“I’m just saying, Helntur. More than half the horseclans, a good slice of the holders and high-ups, an army of levies and grim Eastmarcher veterans, and half a dozen troupes of sellswords beneath his banner — a clever man’d stand amongst them rather’n against them.”

“Sellswords?” Simra was on his feet and crossing the room before he could think. Journal clutched tight-closed against his chest, there were only a few steps now between him and the gamblers.

They stared at him in a split-open silence. He didn’t blame them. He was a stranger in more ways than one, and had interrupted them, with a face that mixed equal parts hunger and terror.

“Sorry… I’m sorry, but—…” he chewed at the inside of his cheek, trying to fumble the Riftspeak words together into something that would give him the answers he needed. “You said ‘sellswords’. Companies of them, here with..?”

“Your ‘jarl’, northerner. Ulfric the Meddler.”

“…or Ulfric the Mender. Depends who you ask.” The shaven-headed one, unnamed so far by the others, shot rail-thin and shallow-jawed Helntur a pointed look.

A blush raged furious on Simra’s face. ‘Northerner’ — his accent had given him away then, after only a few words. “Please…” he tried, “if there’s anything you know about any of the sellsword companies..?”

The three had talked easy moments before but now they sat stiff-lipped and quiet, glaring up at Simra.

“Please, if you’ve seen any of them with a banner like a Vahn rune?”

“A what?”

“A—…Fuck. One of these!” Simra fumbled for a moment to dip his pen and scrawl the crowsfoot fork of the rune, black onto his left palm. His hand shook as he showed them. “You must’ve, right?”

The quiet stretched between them.

Simra swallowed a high panic-pitch of laughter that tried to fight its way up his gullet. “You must’ve…” he repeated, voice small and hoarse. All over again his eyes were pricking at him, hot and stinging.

“I—… Can’t say as I have, stranger.”

The terror bit acrid as anger. Simra’s face twitched tight as he tried to keep it in control. Lips curled into a grimace, he stared down at his hand. The black rune inked there had already smudged, smearing indistinct into the lines of his palm.

“But then again,” said the shaven-headed gambler, “I haven’t been looking over-hard.”

“Where’re they camped?” Simra’s voice cracked as he forced himself not to snap. He wanted to demand to know all they knew and lash out at them for what they didn’t. “All the merc companies, right? Where..?”

“Landside. Near the midden towards the northmost gate, most of them.”

“Thank you…” Simra managed to say. “Shit… I—… Oh fuck…”

Simra turned on his heel and hissed the words to call a magelight into the air. In long hard-stepping strides, he crossed the room. And then he was out the door. Out into the night once more…


	58. Chapter 58

Uncertain wood gave way to stone and bare earth. Hunchbacked cobbles of time-smoothed flint and fired clay jarred Simra’s ankles as he hurried through the city. Alleys and sidestreets, paved in dust and dirt — those at least were more familiar. Still, Riften was far removed from Windhelm. Starkly strangely foreign.

The stony heart of Eastmarch spent its nights in a kind of hibernation. Shuttered windows and barred doors. Closed-up shopfronts, lit in passing by the pine-pitch torches of the uptown guards, or the bobbing glow of the Quarter watch’s pole-lamps. Whereas Riften by night was awake, alight, and crawling with life.

From tableries, taverns, bawdyhalls, the voices of women and men roared out, roister-raised in song and rut, celebration and argument. They lined and defined the streets of Riften Landside. Brick and moulting plaster at ground-level, timber from thereon up, carven or stonestack pillars supporting their open fronts like tusks barring down across a gaping mouth. From each one Simra passed, out spilt sound and bodies, a fever-glow of red-gold light. His magelight guttered cold along their faces and facades, like a torchbug meandering to and from flame, after flame, after flame.

There was a drumming in his head. Every step and every thought, it threatened to overflow. It drove his aching tread. It cowed the pains of his body into sore pitiless silence. But it wouldn’t be quiet itself. Not when he crashed toward a drinking-shop’s counter to ask for directions, and laid down fourpence in copper for a flask of sharp and honey-masked mezga, and found he had no will left to haggle down the price. Not when the flask was a full third closer to empty a few street corners later, and his throat felt scourged by the fire he’d poured down it. Not when it boiled over in a gnash of teeth and narrowed eyes as he cursed a would-be cutpurse back into the city’s shadows before they could get too close.

The cramped streets and crooked alleys gave way to a great open common. Blooms of wide-thrown firelight simmered in the night sky, braced equal apart in the distance. Towers, he reckoned, perched over the city’s north gate with beacons lit up bright. The air was troubled through with murmuring voices and rippling canvas, sounding out above the scent of woodsmoke, cookfires, ripe and acrid waste.

“Here…” Simra muttered. “Please be here. Please.”

And if they weren’t? That was worse than the guilt. Worse than not knowing. They needed to be told. Siska and Vesh. Antolios. Shora. That’s what he was afraid of. But it was that or let the fear stay on inside him, sick forever and growing sicker. Like the story he carried was a burning thing and only sharing it out would stop the way it seared at him.

“Guess you’re not getting paid…” he said to himself. A wet cough of brittle laughter. “Not if they’re gone, right? I mean—… Fuck. If they’re gone…”

Here between the rows and thickets of tents, and the weft and warp of ropes that held them in place, what made Simra a strange sight in the city-proper had become commonplace. His ragged fighting and travelling clothes. His weapon in easy reach. His outlander’s features and the drunken deliberation in his walk. He fit. No-one spared him a second look.

Simra passed from campfire to cookfire, eyes casting round in search of a flag or banner he recognised.

A small Breton with wiry side-whiskers stood leaning on a tall bill-hook, smoking something through a long-stemmed pipe. Something about him put Simra in mind of Moridene. Made him think that maybe here was someone he could trust and ask for help. The smell of the smoke perhaps, or else the polearm he carried. But Simra only stared for a long awkward moment then looked away. There was fear in uncertainty and fear in solid answers. He couldn’t ask. It would’ve felt wrong – profane – like asking a stranger home to help scour dishes, darn trousers, trusting them not to break anything, steal anything, stare aslant and cruel at anything.

He carried on. He stopped.

The banner had been white once. But now the coarse cloth flag had gone pigeon-wing grey. Its edges were tattered. The single red rune in its middle was warped by loose stitches and hastily darned repairs. But it stood there just as it had so many times before. Just as it had in the muster-camp outside the gates of Windhelm — a half-circle of wagons and cramped-together tents, their numbers shrunken by time.

Simra raised a hand to his throat, looking up at it. As if to choke off any shattered little sob that might try to slip past, to sour his mouth and sting at his eyes. A few broken syllables of laughter came instead, more like ragged panting than a true chuckle.

“…Thank you…” he rasped. No knowing who the thanks were for. Any god or ghost or guardian spirit that might or might not have been listening. No knowing how long he stood, and stared, and tried to act…

“Simra?”

The voice belonged to Siska. Who somehow knew just where to find him, any time he needed to be found. Simra turned and saw her. A slice of solid darkness against the camp’s shade and torchlight, with a familiar way of standing, a familiar way of moving. A familiar face as she drew closer, hatchet-hard and nut-shell brown.

“Sim, that you?”

“Mnhm…” He gathered in his arms, hugging himself across the chest, a hand couched under each shoulder. He tried to hold himself together, when all his body wanted to do was shake apart.

The banner twitched above them both, like a beast caught up in dreamstrewn sleep. In a creaking of hide skirts, Siska moved into arm’s reach of him. A frown had drawn deep lines in her brow, knotting and furrowing between them, wrinkling the bridge of her nose. But those lines were a temporary thing. The permanent ones round her eyes, creased and crowfooting at their corners, had multiplied.

“You’re on your own,” she said. Not quite an admission. Not quite a question.

“Yeah.” Simra shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Her mantle seemed heavier than before round his shoulders — too hot for comfort. Like all of a sudden it was something he’d stolen. “So’re you…” he tried to joke.

“Yeah…” Siska didn’t smile. “Time was, a little while back, there’d still be people round about now. Up and drinking. Outta their tents. Talking.” There was an uneasy urgency to her words. Concern, apportioned amongst her features.

“Hm. So…what happened?”

“Same as happened to you and your lot, I’d bet. Folk got tired. Others got hurt.”

“Not enough left for it…”

“Yeah.” Siska angled her head away from him and spat out a blot of black onto the ground. “That too then?”

A tendon pulled taut either side of Simra’s neck. “Uhm. Moridene’s alright. Will be alright. So long as she doesn’t get too unlucky or do anything too stupid.”

“And you’re here,” Siska observed flatly.

“…Yeah.”

“Well,” she said. No life in her words, no feeling in her face. “That’s something, innit?”

The urge to run reared up into Simra’s chest. It bloomed swollen and stiff between his lungs, crushing the air from the both of them.

“I’m sorry,” said Simra, taking a difficult half-step forward.

“I’ll bet… Listen. Dunno how much it’s your fault or not, but I know it’s not easy to not see it that way.”

“I know. I know that. I’m sorry. I—…”

“I get it! I get it, Sim.” Her voice broke open. Bitterness mingled with sympathy. She bristled then deflated — turned tired and breathless. “Save it, alright? There’s others who need it more.”

They’d both been dreading the silence. Now it finally fell, thick and stifling between them. It filled with the questions they couldn’t ask and the names they couldn’t bring themselves to say. One name that was gone and one that remained.

Simra heard the easeless shift of his clothes, hushing against each other, whispering on his skin. He could hear his listless feet — feel them cold and bare against the dusty ground. And he heard Siska’s breathing, unsteady and expectant. With a shuffle of his mantle and aketon, Simra raised the flask of mezga in his hand, up til it hung between the levels of their eyes. Slowly he tilted it, to pour out a dram.

“Think he’d want that wasted?” Siska reached out and gripped his wrist, stopping him before any of the spirit could spill.

“…Probably not. Or maybe not. Dunno.” Simra tilted the flask back upright, pushing it a few inches toward Siska. “Have some. Awful shit, but…”

She took the flask by its scrawny neck. “When’s that ever stopped me?” Jutting her chin towards a dying campfire, Siska led them both down onto a few lengths of planking set around it. “Come,” she said. “Sit.”

They sat.

She drank. “You’re right…” she said.

“Pretty much piss?”

“About that, yeah.”

The flask came Simra’s way. In the guttering firelight, he saw a finger missing from her right hand as she passed the mezga. “How—… How’d that happen?” Simra drank too. “If it’s alright to ask..?”

Siska brought the hand up in front of her face and raised her brows in an unspoke question. “S’alright…” It was strange to see. Neat almost. Her middle finger was docked clean at the second knuckle down. “Dumb shit. Grabbed a sword some itchy prick was trying to stick me with.”

“Sounds familiar…” Simra shook out his left arm and showed her the splint that still braced it. “You get ‘em back?”

“Knife,” Siska nodded. “Right in the neck. You?”

“Yeah… Dumb shit,” Simra agreed. But he remembered the withered welt he’d made of the Weeping-Cloud guard’s neck and the side of his face, and knew near enough anything was better than that.

“Still alive though.”

“Both of us. Yeah.” Simra passed back the flask.

“More than a lot of folk can say.”

“Yeah.”

“Some for better,” Siska drank once. “For others, plenty worse.” Twice, and she offered the flask over again. “You did fine, you know. You did good…”

Simra kissed his teeth and looked at the dirt between his feet. At the bottle hung in his hand, between his upcrooked knees. “So anyway, we agreed, right? No drinks spilt out in honour of friends who’d call bullshit. So…” Like her, he took one sip. “Another extra drink each. On behalf of absent friends we’d much sooner be sharing with.” Like her, he took another.

“Ffht.” Siska reached out with her maimed hand and snatched the bottle back. “One for me and one for the memories? I can do that…”

“To the leftovers. And to the ones we’re left missing.”

“To those that’ve made it this far. And to those we wish were right along with us.”

“To stories still in the telling. And to stories that’ve come to a close…”

The silence that fell after that was more comfortable than any that’d come before. Simra’s vision was blurred. His eyes were prickling. But the sway and well of his thoughts was soothing somehow. Soraya had warned him: careful who you let see you cry. But here and now, with Siska, he was being careful. It was alright. And it was never going to be alright. But that was alright too.

“Stories, then…” she chuckled in the thick voice that she meant she was back to chewing again. “You wanna go first? You usually do.”

“Nah. You go first. Please.”


	59. Chapter 59

“Angry?” Antolios smoothed a hand over the lines of his jaw. It was shaved so clean and close his olive-brown skin looked polished. “Why should I be angry, Simra?”

Because things had gone to rags and tatters. Of the three mercenaries he’d sent out, each one of them counted as a casualty, some way or another. Because the whole thing was a blighted mess, and only one in three was returned to say as much.

A dozen reasons crowded vexsome in Simra’s mouth. Like unwanted teeth, new-grown and unneeded, grinding into place through his gums. But he stayed silent. Sat on a stub-legged stool, he fixed his half-focused eyes on the Vahn’s commander, and troubled the tent’s dirt floor with his toes.

“Nothing?” Sat behind his fold-in field-desk, Antolios raised one dark and careful brow. “Specifically, Simra, why should I be angry at you? You’ve given me no reason. Unless, that is, there’s something you’re holding back..?”

Tight-lipped, gaze falling to the ground, Simra shook his head. “Told you the whole thing,” he answered. “Nothing left out, just like you said.” He’d spun the story before. Tested it on Siska. The white lie that formed its lynchpin came easy by now. The rest was all true as memory could make it.

“Then you’ve got nothing to fear from me.” Antolios gave a small white smile. It faltered a moment later, maybe as Simra’s frown refused to fade. “You got the job done and you came back. And that’s no small thing, is it? Not if everything you’ve said is true. I won’t deny, it became more of an undertaking than I’d originally thought.”

Simra’s eyes flicked up again, dark-socketed and sleeplorn. His lips peeled back from his teeth, pursed and ready to noise against them. “An ‘undertaking’?” he echoed. His mouth barely moved. His teeth hardly parted.

“Challenging,” Antolios clarified. “A trying experience, there’s no doubt about that. I’m not a man easily impressed but—”

“But I fucking managed it? So you’re impressed with me. Well thank the fucking ancestors…” Simra’s voice dripped sarcastic. “So that’s it then? That’s all? I run back to heel, get a pat on the head, get told I’m a good little scrap and I oughtta be pleased with myself, right?” Simra hunched forward where he sat, elbows on knees, hands steepled together supporting his chin.

“You succeeded where others might not have,” Antolios said, infuriatingly even. “You volunteered for a challenging—”

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare!” Suddenly, Simra was up and standing, lips twisted and eyes hot. “Don’t you fucking dare tell me I ‘volunteered’ for this shitshow! Don’t you dare fucking tell me any of us—… Don’t!”

“If I recall, Moridene volunteered herself.”

“And look where it got her!”

“She’s alive.”

“Kjeld’s not! Because you chose him, sent him off—”

“Sit down, Simra.”

“—he died doing as he was fucking told!” Simra thrust out a finger at Antolios, spearing toward him across the desk. “Doing as you fucking told him!”

“Sit. Down! Please, Simra.”

Like something in the commander’s tone had snuffed a candle inside him, Simra gritted his teeth and slumped back onto his stool. Like something in Antolios’ eyes had doused him with disappointment. Colour stung hot in Simra’s cheeks, sharp as a slap. There was still so much pent up inside him, but he was shamed into silence by every word before he could start to speak it.

“We have been fighting a war,” Antolios said, so slow and patient Simra felt like a child. “I don’t want to think anyone who’s fought or marched under this banner did so under any illusions about what that involves. People get hurt. People die. Those left standing grieve for them, remember them fondly, and move on. In Kjeld, the Vahn lost a good fighter – a good tracker – and I understand you lost a friend. For that, I’m sorry. But there’s no undoing it, and sometimes there’s no avoiding it. We’ve been fighting a war.”

“Nah,” Simra said. “Me and mine; you and yours. We’ve both been fighting wars. Just not the same one.”

“You get pulled into the family feud of a mad Rift bitch with a vendetta to push. I fight skirmish after skirmish against petty horselords, and whatever drab levies the landlords can muster, for a mad jarl cursed with a grand vision. Not the same perhaps, but more alike than not.”

There was still so much pent up inside Simra. Somewhere at the forefront foamed an anger at hearing anyone talk about Kitlun like that: in the same breath as jarl Ulfric Stormcloak and in the same scathing terms. Where Simra reckoned everything he’d done for her was out of necessity, now he found a pang of loyalty, livid at the root of his tongue. But Antolios still had his eyes on him, shaming every word into silence before Simra could speak them.

“Maybe,” said Simra. But he couldn’t make himself believe it. The chaffed away tents that remained in the Vahn’s camp. The familiar faces he’d yet to see, and those he’d seen already — those who weren’t so much survivors as folk who’d so far failed to die. Siska’s maimed hand and dark-lined eyes, and Simra’s own body, scored with scars in the making. It seemed none of them had been fighting the same war as Antolios: still so pretty and pristine, and practical enough to drive Simra mad.

“You know…” the commander leant back in his field-chair. “In mathematical terms, your embassy went better than our campaign. Whether I count your starting numbers as six or three, you only lost a third. The Vahn-proper has lost nearly half its forces. Fourteen of twenty-nine.”

“Those’re both hard fractions.”

“There was a time when you served as my scriv. I would have thought you’d know by now: there are no easy fractions in war, and no jugglery of numbers that’ll make any part of it seem merciful.”

“Mmh. Care to test that?” Simra’s lip curled. “How much d’you owe me now?”

“Sorry?” Antolios frowned at Simra’s change of tack.

“My contract,” Simra pushed. “It finished in Midyear. On – what? – the twenty-fourth. Way I see it, I’m owed my sixmonths’ half-share, and nearly a month again in overtime. We’re talking numbers and fractions now, right? So tell me — what’s it come to?” Simra’s voice clipped out hard and cold as coins.

Antolios’ tongue flicked red across his lower lip. A staggered pause. Sudden lines scored his face. Behind the Cyrod’s hard-set shoulders and stark straight back, Simra’s eyes found their way to the shield mounted on a rack with Antolios’ shirt of mail and scales. The tall diamond-shaped shield was gouged and scarred across the stretch of tough canvas that covered it. It had suffered those blows for Antolios’ sakes, but now he too was starting to show signs of wear. Creased-cloth folds, deep on either side of his mouth and furrowing his brow — all the marks of age in his face that til now Simra had left unseen.

“At an estimate…” Antolios began. His gaze lowered to skim across a stack of wax tablets on his desk, but his eyes weren’t moving right for eyes at work and reading. He was buying time. Improvising. “I might say something close to…forty-five shillings in Nordic silver?”

Simra’s brows lowered and knitted. That was more silver than he’d ever seen in one place, and more than he’d ever hoped to own at once. But Antolios knew that. “You’re shitting me,” said Simra. “That’s fucking dazzle-bait, sir. I know it and I’d suggest you drop it. Forty-five for a sixmonth’s service is…what?” Simra squinted, curled his lip, blinked hard. The numbers unfurled and came together. “Threepence a day at most?”

“It’s more than enough to feed your family for a second sixmonth.”

“Crowshit. My da makes barely less’n that on the docks. Taken alone it’s enough to have you choosing what’s more important between rent or food. I know that much. And if I recall right, the Vahn’s meant to’ve been feeding me this whole while, but I’ve not seen Chioma ladle me a fucking thing these last few months. Even if I took you at your word that forty-five’s fair pay – which I fucking don’t – then that’s extra.”

“Perhaps the assignment you were sent on might be worth – ah – some special consideration there. But we supplied you adequately as we could.”

“So fucking consider it especially then. Pay me more for two missed meals a day. Pay me more for getting things done in trying times. Pay me more for good fucking behaviour! I don’t particularly care how you reason it out for your records, but you are paying me more.”

“Very good, Simra. Good and well. I’d forgotten how hard a bargain you drive…” Antolios smiled a stiff smile but his eyes were flat and cold. He brought his palms together softly into something not-quite a clap. “Fifty-five shillings then. More than two shillings a week.”

Simra huffed through his nose. “Not much more, I reckon, but fair enough. And I do mean more ‘enough’ than ‘fair’, right?” Simra tilted back his head, exposing the long skinny line of his throat. In his mind he searched for one last way to drive his price higher. “…What about the three-and-some weeks I spent after my contract was done?”

“As you said, your contract was finished by then. I’ve got no obligation to pay you beyond the sixmonth you signed on for.”

“And there I was hoping you had some sort of conscience underneath all the contracts and obligations…”

“Sentiment doesn’t mix well with business, Simra. You ought to understand that. Now…if you were to sign on for another half-year, I’d be happy to consider this overtime your first month of service.”

Simra’s teeth clenched tight in his skull. It might’ve seemed a tempting offer six months ago — might’ve even been the goal he was striving towards. But now it seemed like a trap. Another sixmonth furthering the goals of others and risking everything in the doing of it.

“Yeah hold that thought a moment,” Simra said. Then again he’d make at least twice what he had this last half-year. Or else he’d get himself killed. “Let’s say I hold with you at fifty-five. What happens to Kjeld’s backpay?”

“Dead mercs don’t get paid, Simra.” Antolios refused to drop his gaze further. Instead he stared Simra clean through. “You’ve heard everyone say that a dozen times now.”

“And what about the ones with families?” Simra growled. “What about Shora?”

“She—…” Antolios paused, chewing his answer over. “I suppose she’s in Siska’s care now. Her and Vesh provide for her well enough, as they have in Kjeld’s absence. I keep a merciless profession, Simra, but I’m not a merciless man.”

“Fuck that,” Simra spat. “And fuck you!” He was on his feet again and leaning across the table, looking down on Antolios with molten eyes. He repeated, shaking his head in disbelief, “Fuck you and fuck that… You fail to pay a man for the work he’s done you, for no reason but shit luck, and you fucking pauper his only daughter for the same! Where’s the mercy in that?”

“Soldiers get pensions, Simra, and a lot less besides. Sellswords like us? We’re worse off but for the better… So long as Shora carries on in her chores as she does now, she’ll continue to be fed.”

“That’s fucking slavery,” hissed Simra. “He raised her for better. He was counting on better for her. I fucking swear, Antolios, where’s your fucking mercy?”

“Here!” Antolios said in a cowing bark. He shunted to his feet, lips pulled back from his teeth. “Getting spent on her and wasted on you!”

In the lines of his neck and the taut twist of his face, Simra recognised the urge to violence. There in the pale flush of his face and there in his trembling shoulders. Some part of him wanted Antolios to hit him. Like smirking up at the older man through a mouthful of blood would somehow give his words the right. Simra flashed a dare with his eyes. His lips split into a leer. He wanted the bastard to hit him. To see his voice had lost its power, and now there was only the force of his hands.

But Antolios slouched at the shoulders. His body went slack and his hands pressed palm-down to the table between them, supporting the sudden weight of him. “I’ll give you sixty,” he said, head hung low.

“You’ll what?” Simra stepped back, scowling. His arms crossed over his chest.

“I said I’ll give you sixty-five shillings in silver. Keep as much as you want, give as much to her as you see fit, explain as much of all this as you reckon is right and fair. Only lose yourself when you’re done.”

Antolios turned his back on Simra with a limp tired wave of one hand. He crouched before a large chest that lay on the ground. A key clicked in its lock. Simra tried not to crane his neck after the jagged sound of coin sliding against coin.

“Gods rot your eggs…” Antolios bit off his own curse and turned it into an underbreath growl as he set down two short stacks of irregular silver coins. A moment later, he brought out a canvas purse from inside the folded and belted front of his blue-dyed tunic and fished for the shillings that would make up the final stack. “There’s half,” he said curtly, and set to scrawling and signing a writ on a curl of loose parchment. “Bring this to Ra’baali and she’ll see you get the rest, but from here on, you’re dismissed.”

Like a carpenter collects shavings of wood from the plank they’ve been planing for use later on as kindling, Simra scraped the silver off the table into one hand with the edge of another. Just a little more filled his palm than his closed fingers could keep safe and comfortable. Half a pound of silver if it was a grain of an ounce. He held out his hand for the writ.

“Am I understood?” Antolios said. His voice was beaten thin. “I want you gone. I’m tired. You could’ve been useful, Simra. You could’ve been any number of things, damn it, not least of all rich. But I’m so tired…”

“Feeling’s mutual, sir…”

Simra spilt the shillings into the timeworn velvet bag he’d found, back in the abandoned hamlet, and took the writ. No more words after that. He left the tent without looking back. It didn’t feel like a victory. Not even when Antolios’ voice broke out in a strained yelp behind him:

“Good luck finding her you whoreson little wretch! Out of my sight. Get out of my sight!”


	60. Chapter 60

“You told her?!” Simra dragged a shuddering hand down his face. The heel of his palm pressed all but bruising-hard against the hollow of an eyesocket. “Ghosts and bones, Siska, you told her..?”

“Why not?” Siska sat in the entrance of her leathern tent, booted feet propped outside in the dirt. She looked up at Simra where he stood. Her face was impassive but a sheepish something hung in her voice. “Been taking care of her this last while. Felt like I oughta speak to her. Say I’ll be taking care of her a while longer.”

She wore her hangover different from Simra. With her it made her slack – tumbledown-lazy – like a tent improperly pitched. It made all her motions spare as she stuck to stillness wherever she could. Her eyes showed brassy as she squinted past Simra and into the sunbleached sky. For his part, the waning drink had rubbed him raw. That and the words he’d swapped with Antolios had left him like the cord of a bow too long strung: wearing thin from the effort of holding together. Liable to snap.

A grating whine funnelled up his throat. Simra’s lips parted in a wide-drawn white line, but he held the sound behind the grit of his teeth. “When?” he croaked.

“This morning, when else? ‘Bout when you and Toli were hollering at each other.”

“…Oh. You heard that then?”

“Whole camp heard that.” Siska made a face, like cracking the start of a smug grin and then thinking better of it. “What’s a sheet of canvas gonna do to stop the sound of you two howling at each other like a couple wolves on season and tryna arrange a time and a place to—”

“—Fuck, Siska..!” Simra coughed. Breathed a ragged sigh. A burnt dun-pink rose hot in his cheeks and nestled in the spaces between his neck and jaw. “And now she’s—? What? Just…gone?”

Siska spat a long-shot of black away from her tent’s opening and into the dirt of the camp beyond. “She’s twelve summers old, Sim. She does that. Goes off for a day or so, making her own fun or whatever-you-like. I wouldn’t bet you didn’t do the same back when you were that age. Green-Singer knows I did and worse…”

“Shit…” She was right. More than half his childhood had passed that way: clawing whatever time alone he could from the crowded alleys and scaffolds of the Grey Quarter.

“What I’m saying’s that she’s got every reason to want some time to herself now…hey?”

Simra’s tongue flicked across his lips in irritation. They were sore now from so long spent worrying at them. “I needed to speak to her.”

“Why?”

The question was blunter, more forceful than Siska’s tone had been so far. Simra flinched from it. “I—…”

“What’s she to you, hey? What’s she ever been to you, really?” Siska’s voice broke hard and exasperated. “Before you do another pissing thing you need to sit down and ask yourself: d’you need to find and talk to Shora to help her bear the weight? Or to lighten your own by tipping it onto her?”

“Ffhht..! I—!”

“—Did I say ‘talk’? Because, pigshit, Simra, I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell you to talk, I told you to think!” She rapped her hand against one temple. Made a clicking noise with her tongue.

“Crowshit..!” Simra spat and turned in a scuff of heels. He paced hard through the troughed and rutted mud of the camp, sun-baked stiff and uneven. “I know my reasons!” he barked without looking back.

“No doubt!” Siska called after him. “But, Y’ffre’s beard, they better be the right ones! For your sakes, I hope so, Sim!”

A redheaded child in amongst all the dark hair of the Rift. How hard could she be to find?

Simra stopped on the edge of the mercenary camps to ask a seller of shade-cool flavoured water – infused with fruit and herbs, served from a pot half-buried in the dark ground – to ask if she’d seen anyone fitting Shora’s description. He got only a blank stare in return til he bought a parchment cup of her product and was sent again on his way with a kernel of a lead for his copper coin.

As Simra searched through the camp and into the city, numbers jostled like dicing-bones, thrown about in his skull. Strange how a pound or so of one thing could be worth so many bushels of another. A head of cattle or a hauberk of mail. Six months of work and risk, fear and the following of orders. Three-hundred-and-some pounds of prime mutton for a pound of silver — why? A horse for riding, in return for something you couldn’t eat or drink or travel by…

That was good. All that rattling deafed out the fret of his thoughts. But the silver came with its own worries. Even carrying half of it round an unfamiliar city felt like sacrilege. Like he was tempting the worst kind of luck.

Not a step or streetcorner turn went by that Simra didn’t feel – or reckon he felt – the silver’s weight sullen inside his gathersack. With his pot-bellied kettle, the last of his pine-smoked tea, the stiff covers and thick pages of the tome he’d found, he’d jumbled it in, hoping the rest would help to hide it.

The level peaceful parts of his mind tried to soothe the whole rest of him. It was fine. He looked like any other hard-times sellsword, barely worth the bother of robbing. Certainly not in broad daylight. But those parts of his thoughts had been so quiet of late — good as drowned next to the market-day rabble and creech of his fears and doubts and furies, whose louder voices made it hard not to listen.

After the market hurry of morning, the city was quieter by day. Between the putrid damp of streetside gutters, the reddish road-dust lay undisturbed. The same shopfronts Simra had seen clapped tight the night before were thrown open. Their insides offered cool shade, shelter from the summer-hot midday sun. Saddlers, leatherworkers, and money-lenders. Barber-surgeons. A street of near-nothing but candle-makers with a single stone-chimneyed bakery at its head.

Some of the shops were just-opened. Others were coming toward closing time after a morning’s trade. Better to ask help from those here through the morning. Better to ask those who’d plied their trade outdoors than those who’d stayed inside. At the mouth of an alley, Simra asked at a stall selling clay flasks of fat and prickly-skinned pickled cucumbers, and radishes, and some kind of sharply scale-petalled flower-bulb whose name Simra didn’t know.

“There’s a knocking-shop down the way’s got a rust-haired girl, if that’s what lights your lantern,” said the round and red-faced Nord minding the stall.

Simra sucked at his teeth and went on without another word. He stopped at a jagged junction between three narrow streets. What magic had his mother used to find him when she crossed the border from Morrowind and discovered him with Siska, Vesh, Kjeld and Shora? If he were twelve again and carving out a patch of solitude for himself in Windhelm, he’d have already hid himself into thin air. Hopeless for anyone hoping to track him down, at least without spells to help them. But he knew Windhelm better than Shora would ever know Riften. Perhaps there was still hope left in his searching.

An hour later he’d asked two more streetside vendors. Nothing but a scowl from a shopless cobbler, and a more fulsome tip-off from a seller of fatty-fried broadbeans. He travelled towards the water. At some point, Riften Landside became Lakeside once more. Bushels of produce from outside the city were brawned onto piers and jetties out of flat-bottomed boats here. Baskets of shimmer-skinned and egg-pale fish were tipped onto stalls bedded with cooling lake-weeds. Broad-cheeked and shag-haired Rift children dashed between stalls and unhaulings, pestering wayfarers and workers alike. Simra pulled one aside and pestered them in turn.

“Have you seen a girl round here?” he asked in patient but awkward Riftspeak. “Maybe two years bigger than you are? Red in the hair.”

The urchin raised a hand and rubbed the fingertips of one hand together. A universal gesture Simra knew beyond the limits of language. He fished in his main use-purse and took out a whole copper penny.

“Uramr…” The child murmured the Riftspeak word like an honorific. Beamed a gap-toothed grin and reached out an overgrown hand for the coin. “Come!” A clumsy attempt at a wider-known trader’s Tamrielic. “I show you!”

“No,” Simra warned, and drew back the coin and slipped it into his closed palm, withholding it. “Tell me.”

The urchin’s description led Simra along a winding puzzle of walkways and across a clamber-up of ropebridge stretching dead out above the oily water. It landed him on a spitty islet of wooden struts and planks. Over a broad stretch of lake that led in toward Landside, another similar spit sparred out in rough symmetry. On both sides machinery, pulleys, and tangled spools of rope and rigging lay unused. Tall cogwork cranes and turnkeys ran cables across the water, like the workings of an enormous catapult, designed to draw heavy boats in or out from what looked like some distant inland drydock.

A small figure sat with dangling feet atop the thrown-out arm of a crane. It was strung with scraps of rope, wind-twisted flags and serries of bunting. Like a gibbet at rest between hangings, it reached out a ways over the water.

“Shora?” Simra stood at the crane’s foot, where long struts and wooden bolts anchored it precarious to the jetty. Some pale red feeling choked his voice while it was still in his mouth. He called again. “Shora?”

The figure turned its head. A pale face in a hoodish mane of red hair. With a child’s strange and fearless ease, Shora kicked one leg over the crane’s beam and then the other, til she was sit-straddled on it and facing Simra. No sound from her, but that was nothing new. Still, Simra could feel her stare in the restless hackling of his neck and forearms. A long moment passed before she raised an arm. Not a wave but a resigned beckoning.

“You want me to come up?”

Shora sat unmoving. No concession, no dissent.

There was a time when it would’ve held no fear for Simra. No longer. His Grey Quarter climber’s wiry strength was still there — honed perhaps. That and a dauntless mind. But his right and left arms would fight him every hand and foothold. Simra knew that. Smothered it. Began the climb.

The thought and action of it formed a flow. Careful, eye the path ahead. Careful, follow with near-blind feet and searching hands. Slow the way onward, slow the way up. Merciful, it filled most of his mind — stopped him worrying what he’d say once the climb was done. Whatever room that process left was taken up with pain. The gripe of his right shoulder’s overtaut muscles. The warning weakness of his left forearm, barely halfway healed. For once he was thankful he had no shoes to wear.

Somehow the sun gathered hot in the shade of Simra’s clothes, between skin and shirt and unfastened aketon. Sweat thistled against his flesh and stung at the corners of his eyes. He scaled over the last support strut and scrambled ungainly onto the crane-arm’s top. In a hurry and in better days he might’ve been able to scamper catlike across it on all fours. Instead he swung a leg over to saddle himself on the beam. And with jerks and shuffles, he moved toward Shora, slow and stupid and safe.

Shora said nothing but fixed him with wide hard eyes, round and dark-grey in her pale face. Simra didn’t know why he’d expected any different. He’d known her maybe a full sixth of her life but in all that time she’d said only a few handfuls of words to him and only a few more in his earshot. Now her brows raised thick and auburn and she tilted back her head — a jut of her chin, expectant towards him.

“You heard from Siska, then?” he said, slow.

Shora nodded once. Her gaze didn’t waver.

“And…are you…alright?”

Shora dropped her stare to the beam between them. She raised a small hand and made it tight round the woven leather strap that fastened a shield to her back — the outsized shield her father had made for her.

“Course,” Simra muttered, raising a hand to rub guilty against his temple and forehead. “Obviously – uhm – stupid of me… I…wish I had something of his to give you. That’d be better maybe, but…” But his eyes flicked up and found the rim of her shield: a dark round halo to her silhouette. Once too heavy to hold, today she’d clambered up here with its weight working against her, easy as anything no doubt. “You’ve got that though, haven’t you?”

Short and ragged, her nails trifled with the braided strap. She sucked her lower lip sullen into her mouth and puffed out her cheeks. Simra heard her take a long deep breath before, a stranded moment later, she spoke. “Why’d you come looking for me?”

“I—…” Simra struggled. “Wanted to make sure—… I mean… Why did you come out here?”

“To be on my own?”

“I get that. I do.”

“Then why’d you come?”

Because sometimes some things are more important than comfort. Because someone needed to. “Because…” he began. Because he could already feel it brewing in him – another departure – and he couldn’t carry the whole weight of this silver home, not like this, he couldn’t. “Listen. I spoke to Antolios. Got some—…” It was hard to say. Why was it so hard to say his name? “—Some of your da’s backpay off him.” A lie, but one in practical terms no different from the truth. “You should have it.”

Simra swung the main weight of his gathersack round to his front and began to root through it. For money that felt so wrong to have and to hold, placing the threadbare purple velvet pouch on the beam between them and pushing it a short ways towards her still had a wrenching feel to it. Painful as spending coin ever was. So what was he buying here, when he was paying so dearly?

“Take it,” he said, voice tight. “Don’t want it to fall.”

Shora closed her hand round it and clutched it into a baggy crescent-shaped pouch she wore at her belt. No check for the weight, no glance at the contents.

“It’s silver,” Simra said. “Quite a lot. About thirty-two shillings in there.” More than he’d ever had. Half of what he’d fought for. Gone now. “You should have it,” he repeated, dumb.

“I’ve got it now.” The featureless flatness of her voice was unnerving. “You can go.”

Simra would’ve known better what to do with tears — he’d shed his own for Kjeld, after all. But perhaps he’d also been to the place that held Shora now? Barren, empty, and grey. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your da – Kjeld – was good and kind and brave and clever. I – uhm – he meant a lot. To me, I mean, after a while. And I can’t imagine what it’s got to feel like, for you, losing him, but I think maybe I know how you’re feeling now and…I know the money won’t change anything, and I know that knowing it won’t change enough of anything else but—”

“Don’t.”

“…sorry?”

“Don’t tell me.” Shora hacked in with blunt words. “Don’t tell me how he died a ‘good death’. That’s a lie.”

“It…” Simra’s voice stiffened, then went slack again as he tried to gentle it. “Yeah. It is, isn’t it? The lie they tell us all, in the stories and the songs, to—”

“I said don’t!” Her face writhed into a scowl. The first time Simra had seen her angry. “It’s not their lie. It’s yours. Your story, and everyone else is telling it. They say he’s up in Sovngaarde like that makes things better. But it doesn’t, and he isn’t, or else I’d dream of him, but I don’t. He’s just gone.”

A fear coiled rings round Simra’s gut so tight and hot it felt like rage. Bordered on anger and threatened to bloom. She knew. “What did you just call me?”

“A liar,” Shora said. “You must be. He wouldn’t do what you said he did. Choose saving you over coming back to me. Not ever.”

“He didn’t have a choice,” Simra growled. “We didn’t have any other choice.”

Shora spat to one side, off into the oily-faced water beneath. “So in your story, why’d you make it like he made one? Chose to stay and fight? All the others believe you, Simra. I don’t.”

Simra’s fingernails peeled splinters from the wooden beam between them. His teeth ached, jaw on jaw. It didn’t matter. When would she ever see him again? He’d tried to make things better – do right by her – he’d tried. And now it was done.

“Spend it well,” he said, starting to ease back along the crane’s narrow arm. His voice was bow-drawn with the effort of holding back a snarl, a howl, a cruel farewell. “Spend it slow. You’re a clever girl, Shora. There’s too much of your da in you for him to ever be gone.”

What did it matter? What did it matter, after all?


	61. Chapter 61

_Riften’s narrow streets are overhung with shade at all hours excepting noon. Still, look up, and you’ll see every alley roofed with a stripe of clear bright blue. In all the vast and voidsome sky, scraps of cloud have become a rare sight. Like the hot and high-strung sun has chased them off to find their own cool shade beyond the horizon, wherever the moons sleep during daylight._

_Midsummer in the Rift, and no wonder that every food market or street-stall I pass is all in overflow with fruit. Bowls of green and yellow plums. Baskets of rheumy-dusted purple stone-fruit and tart black grapes. More sweet things grow in the Rift than ever I was used to or could hope for in Eastmarch. Their plenty makes them almost cheap, and my recent pay’s made me almost rich._

_I spoke with Ra’baali about the other half of my earnings. Showed her the writ Antolios had penned, to the tune of 32 shillings in silver. Of course he and she must both have known there was never that much silver to spare on something so petty as pay. But as a quartermaster, Ra’baali is nothing if not pragmatic. She knows that there’s savings to be made in exploiting someone’s haplessness. And by the way she tried to knave me on the numbers and terms of my payment, I got the impression the Vahn has a dire need for savings these days. Pity she found me cannier than most._

_Her first gouge was trying to give me half the price in goods rather than coin. The Vahn, she said, couldn’t offer up the whole share in silver but would happily dole it out in things of equivalent worth. But I know from long experience that taking on someone else’s definition of a thing’s value is a rustic-dumb way to get cheated. And I told her, sweet as I could, that while I wouldn’t take barter on grounds of not wanting to deprive the Vahn of useful supplies, I’d happily accept the agreed fee in any coin available. Foreign or native, silver, copper, or black iron, fussless as I am._

_We fretted at each other on the issue back and forth. Through bared teeth and knife-edge eyes we carved out a kind of compromise. I gave up on getting nothing but coin and Ra’baali gave up on trying to buy me off with beads and bangles, potatoes and butter and lengths of rope. She singled out something I might want, and we agreed on a medley of cold coin to make up the difference._

_19 silver shillings. 6 terci of Imperial silver. 11 Eastmarch black iron pennies. 10 pence of copper. And a pair of boots from the Vahn’s inventory. High-rising and made mostly from loose soft-scraped sheepskin, wound round to fit with leather cord. A pair of rider’s boots in that sense, like I’d seen on Kitlun’s warriors, but made from tougher tanned leather around the feet themselves, and with hardy soles for walking. No doubt I’d have paid a steeper price with any other cobbler in the city…_

_And that was our goodbye. A thing woven through the silence between us as I knelt to wind the boots’ lace bindings round my calves and fasten them below the knee. Then the hung and wordless moment when I took my leave._

_My point is that I spent a tuppence of copper as I passed through a market this morning, and didn’t feel I’d frittered it. A half-pound of peaches and a good handful of wind-dried apricots in leathery spirals of dark sweet orange-brown. After all, I had a journey ahead of me. Who could blame me for provisioning it? The peaches were mottled petal-pink and white, hard-fleshed — sweet as honey, or cool water on a long dry day._

_But the Rift’s warm southern Summers have their sourness too._

_Parched by the sun and mustered up by unbroken winds, I’d seen towers of red clay-dust eddy up from the plains to stand and fall and sweep the land, huge even when dwarfed by distance._

_But every few days, I’ve found, Riften’s blasted by waves of the selfsame stuff, billowing occasional in from the open flats. A scourging fug of dust that sweeps through the streets and into every fold of everything you wear. A smut on your skin. A claggy gummage round your mouth and nostrils and eyes, if you don’t find shelter or some means means to cover up._

_The first one I witnessed left me dazed halfway to wonder and back, imagining myself in Morrowind, caught in one of the ashstorms I’ve read and heard so much about. The second had me swearing and pawing at my stinging eyes, spitting as I tried to unclay my mouth._

_Twice bitten, I went from there onward thrice prepared. Stripped to tunic and trousers and boots, to help bear the heat of the day, but with all my other outerthings bundled and tied down to the straps and bodies of my bags. My mantle and aketon stay stored that way. But more than once the wind’s picked up and I’ve hurried to unknot my patchwork scarf from my satchel and swaddle my head in it to keep off a flurry of dust that never came._

_I’m meandering as I write. But hasn’t that been the way with my days of late? Knowing they’re my last in Riften, I try to hoard up experiences, stories, memories in the making. And like trying to hold too much grain in your hand, some overflows and some’s spilt through your fingers. I hurry and wander, til what I do stops looking like a story and turns into something more motley by far. One thing after another, with no order but the order they came in._

_A half-hour went by as I haggled with a clothier in the shade of Riften’s eastmost wall. A half-hour’s haggling, all over the buying of one tunic. Strange how nearly all his stock was closer in style to the deep-necked kurtas of the Grey Quarter than the high side-fastened collars worn through the rest of Eastmarch. Only the Quarter’s slit sides and low-hanging ‘v’s of skirting at front and back, and the broad-shouldered tight-wristed taper of Rift tunic sleeves to mark a difference. That and the matter of different embroideries…_

_Needlework cost extra. Two-and-a-half more pennies for a thing he maintained I needed, while I contended that I didn’t. Eventually I decided ‘need’ was too strong a word, but reckoned ‘want’ would cover it. So I came away with a cream-coloured tunic of thinnish fine-ish wool for a penny iron and two copper. A Riftfolk tunic, with black designs of running creatures, chasing each other round its bottom hem, and red curls of flower and stem stitched about the collar. While it’ll last me longer than the fruit, some lean unpleasant part of me reckons that it’s the greater waste of the two. Or rather that it’s wasted on me — more than I deserve._

_But for every moment I chase after luxury, there are as ever half a dozen more where I am frugal out of long-taught habit._

_Chioma may’ve been told I’m no longer signed on with the Vahn, or else may not’ve been. Either way he’s not stopped feeding me. One meal in the morning, one come evening. Perhaps as a gesture at making up for the meals I’ve missed. Porridge or hardcakes. Then later, the sourish soup he makes with split peas and sharp greens, or stews of summersquash and mutton, or great hashes of cured pork, simmered grain, bitter plums and the Rift’s hot redspice. Simple and unpaid for. But compared with the fare that travel got me used to, all that feels like glorious excess. Enough to leave me licking my fingers and lapping at my bowl._

_I go about the last of my preparations, saving where I can. Shop for what I’ll need to supply my journey home._

_Part of me wonders whether I ought to have accepted some of Ra’baali’s suggestions of payment in butter and barley and biscuits. But I wouldn’t have trusted myself to keep fair prices for bulk supplies in mind at the same time as not letting myself be clipped over on the rates and worths of four different kinds of coin. Best to do one thing at a time and do it as best you can than do a number of things at once and badly._

_And any case, I could never carry all I’d need to supply the twenty-five or so days’ hike from Riften back to Windhelm. I’ll have to pause and restock on food along the way. Which of course means twenty-five days is too kind an estimate by far. In Eastmarch this ought to be easy enough, as I’ll be going in the main by road, between towns and hamlets. Across the near-trackless Rift, I’ll have to forage best I can, go hungry where I can stand it, and rely on what supplies I can haul._

_So far that’s as follows._

  * _Two pounds of hard strong ewe’s cheese. Fourpence copper._
  * _Three pounds of unrolled oats. Threepence copper._
  * _A pound of dried fatty mutton. Two copper pennies._
  * _A half-dozen palm-sized buns of dark and crusty bread with caraway seeds. A penny._
  * _And the dried apricots._



_I was tempted by salted fish as well, but didn’t trust them not to spoil on hot days out in the open. Spending so much money on food at once, over a day and across two markets, left me scolding myself at the loss of copper. Having a handful of saltfish go bad halfway across the Rift would’ve driven me past the point of tears and curses. Not a risk I reckoned worth taking._

_But for all my worries about sufficiency and excess, and in all my time chasing through Riften after grain and cheese and meat, I’ve gotten myself the starting scraps of a sense for the place. And if knowledge and experience are worthy wages for your time, then I’m not coming up everywise poorer._

_For instance. In spite of all their differences of tongue and culture, seemings and workings, the heat makes most of Riften and Windhelm’s Grey Quarter smell pretty much alike. The seethe of gutters and churn of battles fought between dust and mud. The dismal foundation to the pride Riften takes in the leather it makes: tanneries, stenching the air lung-skinning and acrid. And perhaps the reek of rot here is worse than that of a Summer at home. Perhaps because Riften wastes more in terms of peelings and bones, offal and offcuts than the Quarter ever did, and it keeps no pigs to clear the streets. In fact, Riften allows no living livestock inside its city-walls. A remnant, or so I’ve heard it told, of some old law about the keeping of horses and trading of herds._

_Together with the duststorms, the sights and the sounds and the people, these are the things I reckon I ought to be recording. A foreigner’s impressions of a stranger’s city. Like in the few eye-witness histories I’ve read, or else the traveller’s guides that dot my old Morrowind almanac. ‘Reflections on the Cantons of Vivec’. Bonorion’s ‘Wanderings’ — or rather their third volume; the only one I’ve ever gotten hold of. The things I’ve learnt and the thoughts I’ve formed don’t amount to much by comparison, but neither am I ready to count them as a waste. Knowledge is knowledge, and only forgetting wastes it._

_I’ve already gone further from home and seen more of the world than most of my generation in the Quarter, or near any shepherd’s son in the hills of Eastmarch. And all that in only my eighteen-and-some years. I’ve done deeds worth calling deeds, maybe, and seen things and known people worth storying. I’ve travelled two lands — set foot in two cities, while it seemed for all my childhood years like I’d never leave my dingy corner in one. And I think it’s fair to say I’ve felt more too. Triumph and loss and the things in between. I’ve known people I’m glad to have known._

_In light of all that, this homecoming feels sweeter than my last. A journey of my choosing. What’s there to begrudge in that?_


	62. Chapter 62

This far from the city, Riften’s stain had left the lake’s surface. No sheen of oil or swirling murk. Simra cupped his right hand into the water, dredged up a handful. Fingers parted, it poured between them, clear and cool. For an eyeblink instant the sun rainbowed through, scattered many-coloured, and was gone.

Squatting on the lakeshore, Simra had gone deep enough into the water that it lapped an inch or two above his ankles. Wet had darkened and slick-sheened the leather and hide of his boots, but still his feet were dry. When he dipped his hand once more and raised another fistful of water to his mouth, it slipped sweet and coldly slaking past his smiling lips. It chilled his teeth. Made his head sing.

Simra reached to his waist and unhitched the waterskin Siska had given him Winter before last. Loosing its cap, he held the skin beneath the water. Watched til the line of gurgles and bubbles tightened to nothing. Raised streaming from the lake, he refitted it at his belt once more, heavy with water for the hot day ahead.

“One more thing,” he murmured. This time his left hand slipped beneath the water. It came up barely a sip, but for his cleaning cantrip it was enough.

He dabbed the middle three fingers of his right hand into the scant cold palmful and lined them in three careful trails down his face. Over closed eyelids and hot cheeks. Between his furrowed brows and down the hard broken bridge of his nose. Simra repeated this three more times, then rubbed the last of the water into his hands, rinsing them clean. As he wrung his hands against each other, he said the words. Six of them in Yoku. Once he’d had to read them aloud from his journal, where they were written phonetic. Now he knew them and the spell by heart, even if he had no concept of what the words themselves might mean.

Simra didn’t need a mirror to know it. He felt cleaner now. A faint new scent hung round him. Fresh-fallen rain on clean-cut stone. Like the smell of a Springtime shower on Windhelm uptown’s grey slate roofs. A scent from anywhere in the world, maybe, but also a scent from home.

“Better…” The word was a purr, somewhere back in his throat. He straightened, unfolding his legs, then backed out of the lakewaters and onto the shore.

The cantrip would do nothing for his clothes. It only cleaned the body, after all. A restriction Simra didn’t understand, but that seemed at least fair. In the stories, hedge-magic like this was always a matter of drawbacks and limitations. The greater the prize won, the more the cost came to resemble a curse. At least that was how the tales ran… All the same, he’d changed tunics before leaving, and now he wore his new one. Its cream fabric blazed white in the sun. The old, he’d washed himself, and now it sat folded in his gathersack, around his woodbound copy of ‘Breathing Water’.

“Better…” he repeated to himself. Like an affirmation. A prayer. It was. It was and would be. He was alone again. On the move again. And already he’d washed away the stench of the outskirt encampments that stood without the walls of Riften. Perhaps the sights and sounds might fall away easier too.

 

_Meat dries in the wind. Parches in the broad daylight. Alongside the hung ribbons of mutton and venison, the limp braces of dead wildfowl, mustered banners and gathered flags fret in the breeze. Impatience is thick in the air. It coats everything like an oil, making time slip by strange in this place._

_Above the dry scents of curing meat, woodsmoke and dungfires, there are other smells. Livelier. More animal. The musk of hundreds on hundreds of horses, sheep and goats. The voices of people come and go, but the braying and neighing and whickering is constant. The herds are never silent._

_This stench is not familiar even to those whose herds are putting it out. They are nomads. They up camp, ride, and move on before it can accumulate. The Riftfolk are not unclean by nature or habit — I know that much of them. But the peacetalks in progress behind the city walls have settled them too long. Outside the walls, the city is fenced in by foulness to the north and east, and the lake to the south and west._

_Between the Rift clans’ camps, the men and women of Ulfric’s fyrds fill every crease of available space. They are part of the same plague. Whether in Riftfolk riding coats, unsashed and open for the heat, or in the tattered and faded blue of Stormcloak’s armies, they swarm like flies and vie like flies amongst all this filth._

_Bearpelt and wolfpelt standards with matted black fur and great hanging paws, claws beetle-black and glistening — the personal standards of Eastmarch’s higher-aspiring carls, embroidered with the name-runes and deed-names of their clans. The more paltry banners of lower carls, their oathbands and fyrdmen, made from tattered blue cloth and stitched with a cram and overlap of names and deeds to make up for their meagerness. The names of the lost are needleworked into the fabric, so that when the fyrds are dismissed and the flags return to their home carlings, villages, towns, those left behind by the dead may read and know and begin to mourn…_

_But there are also those whose names, as yet, the banners do not know. The dying and the injured. Theirs is something damp and sick-sweet that does not waft in the air so much as it cloys. They spill out of the tent-pavilions pitched for their care. They lie in rows on the sunbaked ground. Some still as death. Others lashed to struts of wood or unused sections of siege-ladder, frothing at the mouth, in raptures of terror. Some moan, maybe from pain, or at what they’ve lost — friends, limbs, opportunity, ability… More veterans in the making. Brief-honoured for their sacrifice and then abandoned, just like Ostwulf…_

_This is my memory of the fyrd and clan camps that maze round the outskirts of Riften. I had to pass through to get out and onto the open plain. But the camps sprawled in tangles for what seemed a league or more. All on ground too flat to ever see the distance. No horizon but the tents and lean-tos. Grubby soldiers, restless riders — aligned if not allied for now, but all as wary of one another as they were of me. All of them, forced to wait. Rotting in their sickbeds, or rotting on the vine._

_I remembered what Antolios told me: “Soldiers get pensions, Simra, and a lot less besides. Sellswords like us? We’re worse off but for the better…”_

 

“Ghosts and bones,” Simra muttered. “Horse country…”

Every word thumped blunt in time to his footsteps. For two days now, near enough every breath had done the same. Four paces dividing each long inhalation into syllables, forcing it steady. Four more paces on the tight sigh of each outbreath. If Simra’s time with the Vahn had taught him anything, it was how to march. But all the same, his pace picked up and slacked down as he went. Surges of impatience. Lulls of exhaustion.

For so long he’d stuck to the Rift’s rough fringes. Highlands of heath and ridgebacked hill, scrubby with heather, then tangled with stunts of treegrowth, thorns, thickets of scrawny and silver-skinned birch. In the Rift’s southernmost outskirts, there were always mountains crowding at least one horizon, and always some slope or camber to the ground. Easy to forget that the hold’s edges were each an exception. The land he crossed now was the rule.

Plains, flat almost as far as the eye could see. Sometimes in stripes there might come a snarl of thorns, a furring of taller grass, high spikes of reed to mark standing water or the run of a stream. But in the main these plains were all one texture and all one colour. A flat of bleached green-gold, abristle with short-champed Summer straw. The sky eclipsed it all, vaster and wider by far than the land it loomed above.

“Blighted horse country…” he repeated.

If there were roads to follow, he’d not found them. The Riftfolk had paths for their migrations, to lead them from pasture to pasture through Summer, Spring, Autumn, and then to the hills and highlands where they’d Winter in their halls. But Simra was an outlander here. A footling, as Andral had called him once. Slow and small across a land that to him seemed eerie trackless, endless vast.

That morning he’d left the shores of Lake Honnrich. Ahead of him along the lakeside, he’d seen a village haze into focus. Fishing huts of flattish riverstones and claydust plaster, painted in places with snatches of colour beneath their dark roofs. It was familiar through the haze — a haunted mirror of a similar village that lay empty cross the water. Boats skimmed out on the lake’s sun-glimmering surface. A bowshot away, Simra heard singsong voices, human and raised in Riftspeak. All the same, he turned away. If it wasn’t an omen, it was memories waiting to overwhelm him. He struck out perpendicular, onto a tack that was northbound as his guesswork could make it, and told himself he was coming home.

 

_I saw scarce few other mer amongst the cram of camps pitched beyond Riften’s walls. What scant numbers of elves there were, all but all were Dunmer. Some injured and inert on the baked-hard ground. Others – most of them – hurrying some place or another, with the reluctant haste of an errand-runner. I spoke only to one._

_He knelt on a tatter-edged rug, nearly prostrate, but more in the manner of a washerman than a worshipper. Face dark grey and frowning as he drubbed oil from a soaked rag onto a hauberk of mail laid out before him. Back and forth, over and across, in circles and swipes of the cloth, like scrubbing a floor._

_I squatted beside him, down to his level, and asked: “Whose is the coat of rings?”_

_“Sure as eggs, not mine,” he said with a grim creak of laughter._

_His voice had something of Morrowind in it, same as my mother’s and father’s. A smoky rasp that stole the sibilance from every ‘s’ sound. A guttural hack to every ‘h’. By the way the flesh had thinned on his face to show the shapes of bone more clear underneath, I reckoned him to be their age or close enough. Age is harder to tell in humans, but among Dunmer it’s clear in the ridges of their brows, the shelves of their cheeks, readable as the rings in a tree’s cut trunk._

_I’ve got no ear for accents from across the border, but still his accent let me know immediate what tongue he’d rather speak in. Reaching back to marshal my best Dunmeris – classical, or close as I could make it; not the patois of the Quarter – I said that, yes, he’d have had to wear a barrel beneath it for an undershirt before it fit. Whoever the Nord was that had him cleaning it, I said, he wasn’t a slight man…_

_“She,” he corrected me, switching to Tamnordic for the blunt simple pronoun. An ox of a warrior named Vesna Bear-Choke, he said. One of the twenty-eight shields in the oathband of Ludorad Stone-Setter of the Cloven-Helm clan, carl of Windhelm’s lower Stone Quarter. He listed the deed-names, clan-names, titles in rote boredom, deliberately butchering them into Dunmeris as a small act of rebellion._

_I asked if he came from the Grey Quarter._

_He told me, yes, when last he lived anywhere, he lived with his spouse and sons in the Quarter. The same for me, he said. He could tell, he said. “Marked like an ashlander maybe, but you speak with the same soft smooth voice they do. You dress like them. Wear the same manners as them.”_

_I didn’t ask whether ‘them’ referred to the generations of Dunmer born and raised in the Grey Quarter, or to Skyrim’s Nords themselves. I don’t think I wanted to know. Instead I just said he was right. But if he was from the Quarter, how did he end up serving under the oathband of an uptown carling? Carls can only conscript from within their carling, I thought, and the Grey Quarter has no carl._

_But this old mer was walking uptown at the time of his conscription. He ran a laundry in the Grey Quarter, he said. Usually his sons would take the baskets of laundered wools and furs to their clients in the upper cities, but on the day in question, his youngest son was sick, and his eldest was working already. He ran the hamper to a merchant’s manse in the lower Stone Quarter, and was pulled aside as he made the return journey._

_Though we stooped at the same level – and though I was the one free, wearing boots, a sword, and so on – he spoke down to me. More than just an elder to their younger, but as a better to their lesser. Still, he carried on talking. It seemed, for all I was half a mer in his eyes, he was as happy to speak his mothertongue as I was to practice mine._

_His name, he told me, was Kathras Ulvaen. Or rather, Ulvaen Kathras was what he said, after the old order of names the House Dunmer once used. He supposed he ought to be grateful, he said, that his son fell ill when he did. That he was taken instead. “Not many years left in me anyway. Not here. My heartshare and sons both know the business and will care for themselves. I pray to the Come-Again Three each night, and am rite-readied to join my ancestors. Each battle we face, some part of me hopes to join them.” A grim smile on his face. “There’s a sorgild been promised. A ‘grief-price’ to the families of any who fall. Rather thirty shillings to my heartshare and sons than another few years of living as I do…”_

_I excused myself, beginning to feel sick. Like I could smell death already on him, for how much empty promises and empty living had made him welcome it…_

 

Home. He was coming home. Simra told himself over and over as he walked beneath the near-noon sun. Another day striking out across the plain. Another breakfast of black pine-smoked tea and a dark-crusted caraway bun, and every step he took brought him closer to dinner. Salted porridge with chips of dried mutton, he reckoned. An apricot maybe, as a prize for good progress that day.

Sweat gleamed on his brow. Daybright stung at his cheeks and nose. It would take a harsher sun than this to burn him, Simra reckoned, but the heat by itself was trouble enough. He longed to sit down. He longed for sunset. Cool wind, cold air.

“All the same,” he said. “All the same…”

All the same, every painstaking stride, every ragged breath, he was coming home. For now, the prospect held no dread of its own. It was too distant for anything but the hope that’s always so easy ascribed to things beyond the horizon.


	63. Chapter 63

Birds whirled black in the distant sky. A tower of them, almost, like the tall eddies of dust that scoured the plains below. As some rose, others fell, dark and ever-moving in all that staid blue vastness. Kjeld would have read it like an omen. Tracker-clever, he would’ve known what to make of the birds. Carrion-eaters, probably. That was all Simra could reckon. Scavenging the leavings of some Rift-tribe camp; picking clean the bones of a battle or body given over to the sky — as to which, Simra was none the wiser.

A camp might mean a chance to trade, resupply, but during raiding season it was best to take no chances. Not alone as he was, a foreigner travelling on foot. A battleground might mean a chance to scavenge and salvage what the crows and buzzards would see no use in. Blades, buttons, boots from dead feet — the only thing worse than the ghoulish work of getting them would be letting them go to waste. But he’d listened to his mother’s stories of the adventures she and his father had shared an era ago. And he’d listened to Ra’baali’s more recent warnings. And that was enough to know that battlegrounds attract worse things than reek and robbers.

He veered away from the bristling omen of wings and beaks. But he couldn’t put it full-behind him. Not without coming hard off-course. Instead the birds were always there, funnelling up and falling in great spiral circles, just in the corner of his eye. A constant mumble of motion that drew his gaze unbidden, league upon league after league.

 

_Birds. A tree on a hilltop, all fluttering with the tatters of cloth that Riftfolk tie round the branches of any tree brave enough to stand like that, alone. The blurred worry of something that, seen through the murmuring heat, might be a rider, two riders, or more._

_I’ve found I can walk all through the day and I swear only night-dark will steal away what I spent all morning seeing. Distorted maybe by heat and air and whatever else makes vision strange with distance. (Does the wind twist sight, same as it does for dust or smoke?) But with the horizon so unbroken here, landmarks shrink only slowly._

_And that worries me. Begs questions I’d rather not have answered. From how far-off can I be seen? And just how fool a thing was it really, setting off alone and afoot across the Rift’s huge central plain? No-one warned me off doing it. Not Siska, Chioma, Vesh, or anyone else I spoke to at Riften. But perhaps they trusted my knack for survival better than I trust myself. Or perhaps they didn’t care enough to stop me either way._

_All the same, strange how good solitude starts to feel when you’ve been so long under the eyes of others. Is it that way for everyone? Or just for me, or just for some? At first I didn’t notice. Like maybe at first there was nothing there for the noticing. But it’s dawned on me slow and warm and bright as sunrise. A kind of happiness that’s not so much a thing in itself as an absence of sadness._

_My feet and legs hurt. I ache stiff round the calves and ankles at the end of every passing day. (Six nights since leaving Riften now. Six nights and counting upward.) But my left arm gripes less. Almost healed, I reckon. Enough at least to unsplint it tomorrow. And I’m not angry, and I’m not unhappy, and I’m not pressed on by anyone else. Their eyes and questions, impressions and expectations, and the things they want and need. I’m just myself, for myself. Like a stoppered bottle contains only what it contains, giving nothing out, and taking nothing in._

_Peace. Even when I’m afraid in the night, and can’t sleep without pulling my mother’s trick of holding a pebble in my hand over a kettle to clang if something makes me stir. Even looking about and over my shoulders for some new shape on the horizons all round me. Even remembering Kjeld and how he used to ask me to see for him, like my red-gold eyes saw different from his green ones, until it turned to a joke between us. Mostly I’m at peace._

 

At some point Simra had started singing. No knowing when. Hours ago perhaps – leagues behind him – and from there he’d streamed from one song to the next.

The raucous songs of the Windhelm docks, more rhythmic than tuneful, and sung in time to hauling and the handling of oars. The mournful high lilt Kjeld used to strike up and send drifting through the hollow that he and Siska and Vesh and Shora shared in the mountains with their goats and vegetable garden. The same-and-dissimilar keening of Moridene’s songs, with notes that bent sweet then yowled sour, moment by moment.

Funny how the third kind were closer to Simra’s own range. Funny how more of his mother’s voice came out in his when he tried to sing. A creaking rasping rough-worn thing, older than the throat that gave breath to it. She used to sing him cradlesongs to help him sleep, and sickbed-songs when he fell ill. Droning and lopsided songs from across the eastern border. Hard to tell for certain whether they’d always been wordless, or whether Simra had just known too little of the tongue they were in to hear any lyrics beyond voice and breath and silence. Funny how his mother’s songs found their way into his singing, no matter the music’s origin.

_“…and many a one for him does cry,_   
_down a down, hey down, hey down,_   
_but none yet knows where he does lie,_   
_down a down, hey down, hey down,_   
_and over his bones when white and bare,_   
_down lain down, lain down, lain down,_   
_the wind shall blow forever…”_

It was a song about a pair of ravens, each singing to the other. About a dead Colovian knight, lain still beneath his shield, forgotten and abandoned. About how they’d peck at his eyes and strip his bones — feather their nest with his hair. It was meant to be a sad song, but the lyrics themselves were bounty-joyous, banquet-joyous. Because sometimes even tragedies mean a feasting-day for crows.

A grumbling sullen gurgle interrupted him. Simra stopped the song. A moment later he walked to a halt. With a wet and grinding feeling, his stomach growled again. Simra knew these roadfork moments all too well. Times that, long ago, had taught him the difference between being hungry and needing to be fed. Bodies always wanted something. Several somethings, often enough. The trick was in knowing what they needed and when they needed it.

“Not yet,” he reckoned out loud. Nearish noon he’d crumbled a few lean shavings from the half-wheel of hard cheese that was clothwrapped in his gathersack. “That’s you done. Least til sundown.”

But sundown couldn’t come fast enough. And it was difficult to make himself walk now, when he knew the sun would set just as quick whether he sat down where he was or carried on til evening. All the same, Simra carried on.

He imagined what he’d do from darkfall onwards. Kick together whatever parched dung, dry grass, and plains-scrub he could until he’d made a pile. Light himself a little flicker of flame — just enough to cook by. Pitch his kettle above the fire. And as his porridge cooked through, he’d unsheathe his sword. Go through the motions Terez had taught him, back when Terez had still taught him anything at all, and the ways Kjeld and Moridene had built on that learning. Eight cuts thrown out in sixteen different ways, with one hand and with two. Dancing steps and lunging steps. Holding-guards and sliding-guards. On and on til he worked up a sweat. Then he’d spell himself clean. Eat. Read or write til sleep came heavy on his limbs and eyelids and swallowed him, dark and dreamless til morning.


	64. Chapter 64

_I defy anyone to find a quicker incentive to anything at all – for better or worse – than hunger. Last night it had me kill a wolf. This morning saw me skin it. Badly maybe, but an effort was made._

 

Even now, the shudders came and went, like irregular echoes lost and found in fog. Hours had passed. A fretful night’s sleep and dreams that were half made of memory. A high white baying that sounded like laughter snapped at the heels of every thought in Simra’s head.

It showed in what he’d written so far. Smudged and shaken, even beyond his usual compact tight-lined scrawl. Even in the calm between fits of fear, it showed in Simra’s stillness. The stiff set of his shoulders and palm-scoring clench of his fists. In how he’d yet to take a single step from the scorch-dead patch of grassland where he’d laid camp the night before.

The corpse of the thing he’d killed was pitiable in daylight. A motley of clay-brown and dapple-grey fur clung to it in patches, but lurid pink and red showed where Simra had partway unskinned it. A ghast-slick shape, still glistening — starveling-lean some ways, but gross with muscle in others.

Simra knew that anything bigger than a rabbit needed hanging before you could eat it, but what way did he have to hang this? No treebranch or spear-shaft to use for support, he’d done his best to bleed it instead. The ground murmured testament to that. It still reeked charnel and sickly where the grass was glutted with blood.

 

_I imagined the things I might eat if I only had tools for hunting, or any versing in how to use them. But I’ve got no bow, nor the skill or strength to aim and draw one. No spears to throw, or hawks or hounds to hunt, and certainly no mount to run down prey. I never learnt to snare rabbits or stalk deer. And though I’ve heard tales of Nordic clevermen and Velothi who had spells or songs to make prey come willing to the slaughter and fish jump from streams into their waiting hands, I don’t know any spells of that sort._

_Hunger forced my hand. I made do with what I have and what I know. What had I seen done? What prey would come to me, unspelled and unsung to? The fears my fire has kept at bay gave me the answer I needed. Not, mind, the answer I wanted. Eyes gleaming in the dark. Howling call and howled reply, chorusing through the black._

_First night I made ready. Ate a cold dinner as I used my kettle to melt down the brick of soap I carry, and whatever fat I could glean off my hunk of dried mutton. Looking forward to a feast did nothing to quiet my belly that night. If anything it sharped my hunger worse than before. I remembered Mere and Kjeld’s cooking out on the plains. I remembered the days where the six of us ate meat for every meal._

_Another day’s walking passed impatient. I thought as I travelled. Wondering down tenuous straits and off in odd directions. How I’d need a fire to melt the grease I’d rendered, but I’d need to snuff it soon after. How, if I wanted to lure a pack, I’d need to kill the flames soon as I was done with them._

_But I thought to myself at that. If I can borrow flames from a fire still burning, why not steal the fire itself? Perhaps. Perhaps. At least for a time. I’d heard stories where great fire-callers did as much. Inhaling the heat and lustre of a fire to keep beneath their tongue til they had need of it — to give them something to burn before the raw stuff of their own magicka, or their own bodies…_

 

There was a tale in it, probably. So ran Simra’s humourless reckoning. The story of a boy so hungry he tried to eat his own cookfire.

He remembered making camp – the same meagre settling as was still unbroken round him – and squatting by the fire he’d set to melt the soap-and-tallow mixture down to oil. He daubed the stuff in a ragged circle round him. Would have preferred pine-pitch, or even mezga, but hadn’t a drop left of either. The quick and smoky flash of flame he wanted didn’t need precision — only results. He made do.

After that, he remembered being afraid. A kind of exhilaration that ran too high and heated not to cross over into terror. That fear had yet to fall away. It still lurked somewhere in his lower chest, tight-nested beneath his lungs. Part of him now, he supposed. Like the heat-scourged rawness that still numbed his mouth and made tender his lips. But the burns would heal quicker. Same as always, same as ever.

Failing the first time had almost come as a relief. Success was worse by far.

 

_See:_

_Knelt in front of the guttery little blaze, I breath deep, I focus. Fire-calling breaths, like my mother taught me, until I began to teach myself. The kind that stitch and spool together what’s within and what’s without. Threads between world and body, binding. I listen to the flames, lean down, breath in…_

_First time, I fall back choking. Smoke-stung, my eyes stream cool down my cheeks. I rub and rub, lain down and coughing. It was the pain that made me stop, but somewhere, buried under it, something felt right._

_I hack the smoke from my lungs. Spit grim smog from the back of my mouth. I try again. Reaching past the pain, I know what to look for now. I grope, unblind, armed with knowing. I seize on that something and pull. The fire gives a sigh — gives out. A few ember-orange cracks of light still dance across its fuel. Orphaned, in time they die too._

_The fire itself is inside me by now. A scorching hurtful instant, then a different kind of feeling. Just a tiny cookfire, barely big enough to fill both my hands, but it dances a frenzy inside my belly. An impatient ache that frets to get free. Something will always be eaten. That’s the way with fire. It takes a force of will to tell it ‘stop and starve’._

_Smoke curls from my nostrils. Every exhalation comes with the taste and twisting sight of the same. No knowing whether I’ll lose my hold on its tether, or if it’ll starve to death inside me first. I worry what’ll happen if it dies in my belly._

_And night falls now. I cup my hands and call magelight. And even that calm and rote little cantrip seems to have a new burn to it. Flickering with a hotter light than usual. Bare-bladed sword across my knees, I squint through the black beyond this glow._

_Time passes. Enough that I’m set uneasy halfway into reading before the night stirs up with moving shadows. The first flash of eyes in the dark, mirroring magelight back at me. By now the burn inside me’s dwindled. Like perhaps I’d gotten used to containing it. I hope, I hope. But more likely the flames had waned, weaker now than they were when I swallowed them._

_Overhead the night is full of stars. Pinpricks of light and clouds of luminous colour. A sky bright enough that it’s easy to believe it’s brim-full of gods. I almost want to thank them for how quiet the pack is. Instead I tell myself through the worsening fear: here I stand with a bellyful of flame; I am for fearing, not for being afraid. It steadies my hands only a little as I move slow to pack away my book._

_Sword in hand, I stand, and think how I’d rather have a spear. A sword’s a thing that people created for nothing so much as killing other people. Not a thing for hunting, or a tool for anything but fighting, unless it’s the only tool you have._

_The wolves don’t leave me waiting long. They circle impatient as I am. Or perhaps they’ve been watching for longer than I thought. And now I try not to think at all. Toe the line between thinking and knowing. Now._

 

“How in the whole entire fuck?” Simra breathed.

One at his front and one at his back and others circling round. They’d pounced by pairs, always one making good on his blindside. Testing him. A whirl of fur and snarling, twitching tails, bared teeth. They worried round and round him. Soraya had told him once how dogs could smell his fear. So, she said, that’s why he mustn’t be afraid. That night he must have reeked of it — terror trailing his every motion and seeping out with his sweat.

“How..?” It wasn’t the second time he’d asked that morning.

He was hardly hurt. Barely a scratch except in the leather of his left boot, just below the knee. That was more than half the surprise. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t remember the night before. More that the fear had formed stiff as a scab round remembering. He’d have to pick and pry to get past. Recalling was easy these days. The difficulty was in trying to stop once he’d started. Too easy to get lost.

Under the light as they crowded in, he’d seen them clear at last. Small things, compared with the grey and black direwolves he’d heard tell of living further northward. Brown and bandy-legged, the colour of dirt and dust and leather. But that was no better. It sparked a more familiar fear. Any Quarter-raised Dunmer child knew to be cautious of dogs and keep well clear from the sound of their barking, but Simra knew better than most. These were more wild dogs than wolves. For him that was worse by far.

 

_Two pounce from the spiral they’ve cast around me. A scatter of sparks as I stamp and scowl a calling. It’s fire cast from magicka, but the fire I’m cradling lends it heat. Enough to stagger their attack and startle the others — like crossing blades with the Riftman I fought before the steps of Kitlun’s hall. A wolf at my front means one at my back. A feint, just like in swordplay. In a wake of sparks, I spin and catch something with the tip of my sword. A flick of blood, on the steel one moment then scattered to air. One wolf cowers off, whimpering, red at the muzzle._

_A second makes a leap for me as I stand too proud of blooding the first. Jaws hard and sharp round my boot’s thick leather. A prick of teeth, but no tearing skin, and that small mercy uncovers my courage. I hack down hard at the snarling thing’s neck, chopping at the back of its spine. I stab down twice._

_I, who’ve killed well-armed warriors, and helped to hunt a troll. A feral dog, I tell myself — a feral dog would have to do worse. But the others aren’t startled for long. Their worst is ready and rearing up when I let go the fire in my belly. Breathing it in and drinking it down were difficult. Letting it go is easy. From my hands and my mouth, and up from my shoulders like wings come streams of sparks. A bright flowing dance of them. The last glow of the flame I’d swallowed proves more than enough. The oil-traps I laid catch light. The pack scatters. Waiting in a ring of fire, I swelter with my kill til I reckon I’m safe. With word and gesture I snuff the flames, slump to my knees, finished._

 

The grass was gone to cinders. The earth beneath it had blazed bare. Simra squat in a circle of heat-parched grass, fringed by soot, a foot or two on every side.

His sword lay nearby. He’d tried to clean the blade after sawing free both haunches from the beast. Still that work had left the steel dull-coloured and sticky. Abused and demeaned by the use he’d put it through.

But that wasn’t what had shook his nerves and left him frayed and jangling. It was the same thing that froze him and made him forget himself when Mere shot them a wolf to eat, nights upon nights ago. No moment of bravery would change that. It wasn’t something overcome once and then clean-gone forever. Instead it was the same every time — a thing to be overcome anew before it overwhelmed him.

He wrote like the effort was a kind of exorcism. On paper he’d made himself brave. But this fear was like a weed. There was no killing the roots. Eventually it would blossom back.

He needed a moment. Time to himself, to piece together what had gone nearly to bits. All night and all morning, he’d needed a moment. It stretched and stretched. All he could do was breathe.


	65. Chapter 65

A livid sun hung low at Simra’s back. From there to here, the sky changed shades like a healing bruise. Blazing pink gathered round a burnt-orange sun that was just now starting to set. The nearer distance was sullen purple, but ahead was already starting to look like night.

Two faint ghosts of moon showed side by side, pinned to a curtain of darkling blue. No stars shone but the earliest and proudest. A faint and greenish glimmer, then nearby, another of dull-gleaming brass. Two Divines, Simra reckoned by how eager they drank up and spat back the sun’s last light, but which two he couldn’t tell. He’d never troubled himself to learn those stars or their wanderings — never chanced on a book that would teach them.

His gaze sank low to the land around him.

The plains had begun to roil and break. Like they were teething, as low ridges and fangs of stone scored hard through the vastness of grassland. Travelling into the Rift, months back, the way had been an uphill climb. A craggy switchback ascent, then shatters of rock and woodland, before the great plateau of the plains began. Now, by shelves and slopes, the land was lowering as he tended northward. A subtle and slow incline, but an incline all the same — he’d have bet on that.

His footsteps had changed their tune. On the plains they’d beat a soft shuffle – a trudge against the grass – but here they crunched and scraped. Not for the first time, Simra heard a scuffle, and tensed, stopped, stared into the long shadows sunset made from the juts of rock around him. But it was only some loose shard of scree his boot had sent skittering.

“Shit…” he muttered. “Jumping at your own shadow now? …Stupid.”

Jags of reddish flint. Snarls of shaded heather and spindly shrubs, whose roots had pushed patient through the stony soil. Between rock and wood, Simra carried on.

Full-dark fell. The moons rose proper but cast no light. That night they were barely shards of themselves, shatters of starlight dim between their horns. Simra called a wisp of magelight. The dark world around him came again into focus, cold-bathed in shades of red.

In daylight he might’ve missed the place. It was all stones, like the land around him was all-but-all made of stones by now. Fragments of flint, mortared with a plaster of spent charcoal, heaped into windowless huts that looked more like cairns than houses. A low-roofed long-house of flint and timber huddled against the steep wall of a ridge. It would have blended into the landscape. He would have passed it by. But by night there were torches burning, and a fire waist-high in the place’s vague middle. A village, just as he’d thought. Ever since he’d heard the second horn sound out.

“Not so stupid now..?” Simra said to himself. The idling hand on the hilt of his sword made a question of it. This could still prove a bad idea.

 

_The long grass hides me. Brushes my cheeks. Tickles the backs of my hands and bared forearms. In simmering whispers the wind makes it speak, swaying in time to the breathing breeze. A sea of grass, all waves and tides, but coloured red-gold and dry straw yellow. A sea then, and this is its coast, where the grass grows deep before the stony borderlands begin._

_I crouch just under the surface and watch the riders go by._

_A bowshot maybe between me and them. Men and women with short-spears and javelins. At their belts, sharp-beaked picks and jut-chinned axes. Eight maybe, or ten perhaps. A raiding party, but a small one. Probably not from a horse-clan then, but the ones from some village or hamlet rich enough to ride. So they ride out hoping to earn first grope at glory in this war-game the Nords play._

_The sour midday heat sets their silhouettes ashimmer. Hard to really tell how far or near they are. They ride westward and not toward me, but still it’s best to take no chances._

_“Come Summer, any Nord’s as bad as a bandit to those as don’t know him,” Kjeld once told me. And I believe the words too well to reckon testing them’d be anything other than idiocy._

_Lying low, I watch them shrink away, slow as the sliding sun and riding in the same direction. But when the wind catches right, I swear I can still hear them. The scream-and-dirge and quick-fingered melody of sack-pipes, maybe. Snatches of singing. And then the retreating call of a horn. Two blasts, one short, one long. Three notes echo back from the way the riders came — the footlings that, in time, will follow them, I reckon. The village from which they rode._

_By the time I stand up and out from the grass, I’m left in a sour muddle of moods. Griping legs and cramping thighs. Weak from sickness and hungry as a forge from a yesterday spent too ill to eat. But here I’ve found it — the edge of the Rift, and the settled folk that hem the plains. I reckoned as much then, and I’ve proved as much now. And after all the ways I’ve been a fool and a failure these past few days, it’s good to’ve been right for once._

_Let me untangle the time for a moment._

_Three nights ago, I started to butcher a wolf for its meat. The next morning onwards, I lost a day’s progress to dressing and dealing with it. Boiling then roasting the belly and ribs and back meat — the tender parts that wouldn’t keep so well. Remembering – or trying to remember – how Mere and Kjeld picked over and made cuts from their kills. Then eating, ravenous, determined to feed up as best I could, while I still was able. The meat was bland for the boiling, unseasoned, but hunger made a good meal of it. And meat is meat, and a luxury either way._

_There was some I had to leave. Good eating but more than I could carry. Waste. The haunches I’d taken and rubbed with all the rocksalt my small pouch held. One good meal the following night, of stewed leg-meat, wild onions and anoragon, with my last two stale-dried rolls of bread playing at dumplings in the broth. Grey-brown unspiced Nordic fare, but hot and hearty to someone hungry beyond complaining._

_By the next morning, what meat I had left was spoilt. A sour smell, for all the salt had kept it dry and warded off the flies that dogged me across the plains. So, meat and salt and the labour of the kill itself — waste. The day I spent sick after trying stubborn to cook out the spoilage and eat it all the same, afraid of my efforts all coming to nothing — waste._

_I was stupid. Saddened for it. The only thing stupider would be failing to learn from the mistake._

_Then the riders, and now Shor’s Stone._

_The air here’s filled with things. Voices, the smell of hearthsmoke, cookfires. Something else too, familiar, but not something I’ve smelt on the air in an age. Not since the saltflats of Eastmarch. It’s faint, and complicated by some new backnote – hot metal?; raw iron – but it’s here. Rotten and stale, both at once somehow, and hard to mistake for anything but sulphur._

_The locals say it’s something to do with their mine. A mist that airs thick through the shafts and tunnels sometimes. Crawls low to the floor one day, heavy as standing water, but the next it’ll trail up light as smoke, out the flues that vent air from the world above to Redbelly Mine below. Seems they’ve long-since given up trying to understand it. All I know is it bothers me some. They say the mist’s rust-red, so how come it smells so yellow?_

_What I know of villages, hamlets, and small-town folk is thankfully quite thin. All the same, I’d guess there are two types of small settlings, wherever you chance to look._

_In the first, the locals are narrow-world people. They distrust and mislike strangers as an unwelcome reminder of what lies beyond the things they do to pass their days and fill their bellies. They feel looked-down-on and maybe they are._

_And then there’s the second sort. The Shor’s Stone sort. The sort who talk and ask questions of any outsider they can grab up. News-hungry, tale-hungry, they chafe at the skinny scope of their lives and their homes. To them, any words swapped with a stranger are escapism. So, they do what they can to keep those words flowing._

 

“Elf..? Elf.” It was better than ‘greyling,’ maybe, but not by much. Simra stiffened. “You write, hm. You write, ist not.” It was barely a question. Just a voice, faulty and sexless and bent with age.

“I was writing,” Simra corrected, prickly. One side of his face creased into a frown. Neither side looked up. He finished the lines, crowding another few sentences black and angled onto the page.

It’s not friendliness really. Not towards me, though it feels a little like it. After days spent in the quiet of my own company, it’s a din.

“The matter’s that you can.” They waited til his pen stopped moving to say it. That was something, at least.

Simra tapped a lean excess of ink from his pen back into the smooth clay dish where he’d mixed it. Rubbing the nib with a rag, already soot-dark from use, he let his eyes up. The speaker was an old Nord woman. Knot-knitted woollens heaped and hung obscure on her frame. A grizzle of grey hair fell in thick braids before her ears and a back-length mane behind them. Her small mouth was dyed a purple so dark as to be near black, like Siska’s teeth and tongue…

“Hm.” Simra cocked his head. “And what does it matter to you?” he asked in a careful mirror of her own Riftspeak.

When had she sat down silent beside him? Compared with the others around the fire, any subtlety seemed like stealth. They were heavy-shouldered Nords — all but the stark exception of one orc. Brown-haired and broad-faced men and women, they were miners bragging and crowing and preparing themselves to turn warriors. They knelt with flat grindstones between their knees, whetting axe-bits and pick-heads. They stretched hide faces over wicker shields, tight as drumskins, tough and painted with patterns and runes. Here were the footlings Simra had expected, making ready to follow their riders at first-light. A ruddy-faced man in a sleeveless roughspun tunic had nodded at Simra’s sword, asked if he was a sellsword, and whether he’d join them. Little coin to be had, he admitted, but plunder and glory and thanks aplenty. Simra knew better than to work for promises. He’d said he had a long road still ahead of him, and declined.

This old woman was one of the few not speaking and joking and boasting with the rest. No doubt when the others went raiding, she’d stay behind. “The matter’s that you can,” she repeated, “and I cannot, and never spent any sorrow on not learning to until lately.”

“You want something written, then? For you?”

“You catch on quick, lambling.” There was not a glint of a compliment in her words. “Too quick, might be. Might be you’re rushing ahead.”

Simra crooked an eyebrow at the old Nord. “You want something from me, you’ll answer your own riddles. If not..?” He shrugged, curled his lip. Looking back to his journal, he craned down his neck to blow dry the page he’d penned.

She raised two rickety hands in surrender. Both wrists clattered with iron rings and clumsy chain bracelets. “Well,” she said. “Well enough. I hear from Ciprun you mean to head north, ist not so?”

“Tomorrow,” Simra agreed.

“And that’s where you come from, hm. North, surer at least than South, I’d say. I don’t know much on how they sound south past the plain, but not like you, I think. You’d speak better otherwise.” Simra’s cheeks pricked hot. She’d sound a fool in Marchspeak too if only she’d bother to speak it. But she carried on in her own tongue. “So. You’re returning, ist not so? You’ve been that way before.”

Simra was too sullen to answer. She took his silence as agreement.

“Vernimwood,” she said. Her gums wrapped difficult round the name — a small vengeance for Simra. “In the Eastmarch, three days north. Do you know it?”

Three days was closer than he’d thought. “Been there travelling north to south,” he said. “Never the other way round. But yes, I know it.”

She broke open a black and yellow smile. “Then you can do something for me, hm.”

“Now you’re rushing ahead.” Simra flashed a different kind of grin from hers. “You want a letter written? A letter carried?”

“To my grandson,” she nodded, already grateful, wrists clattering again as she wrung her hands. “To my Pirmun.”

“Then what will you give me?”

The old woman gave a long creak of laughter, like the wood of a waterlogged boat mid-warp. “I have mutton and bread, hm. Salt. Tea. I have a roof and bedding. And,” she added slyly. “You carry no bedroll. They say: better sleep on the thinnest straw than the thickest stone, ist not so, lambling?”

“Ist—…Yes.” Simra nodded. He was hungry, tired, sore, but not so stupid as to not settle terms before he agreed to them. “Dinner, a bed—” he didn’t know the Riftspeak word for ‘breakfast’ “—morning food. Done?”

“Sworn to,” she said.

“Then tell me what to write.”


	66. Chapter 66

_To Pirmun, son of my daughter, and to be opened by no hand but his._

_I have grown old. You’ll not remember me as anything elsewise, for I’ve been old all your life long. But the matter of it is that, when you see as many years come and go as I’ve seen now, you get a feel for change. Some things stay the same and others come round and round, wax and wane, like Summer, the moons, lambing and kidding and the same face you knew two-score years before getting born again when an old friend’s child’s done growing into it. But other things change with time and won’t unchange themselves for the world. I’ve a feeling it’s that sort of change that’s at work in the Rift._

_The road that breaks to bits where the country starts its upclimb, then turns to a trail, then a track, then turns trackless to nothing — it’s seen more outlanders of late. Folk coming from the North. Just a few at first. Tall iron helms and armoured aprons, such as made them look like butchers, only in blue which is an idiot colour to wear for anyone expecting to get blooded. Outriders on tall downcountry horses, they never stayed long and never much bothered anyone but to swap coppers for bread and marrowbone broths before they were on their way._

_But then Balint’s girl said she caught eyes of a thing while out towards the cliff-fall with her atya’s goats and it was a thing such as she didn’t have mind to make of it. Pillars of smoke, dark as they were holding up the sky. A stain on the land that moved like ants crowding in and out of their nest — sort of crawling. An army down in the lowlands, and for what reason’d they be there other than to be coming this way? Outriders, as ever, are only the first of many._

_With their footling boots and ploddy going, their thousands trod the track to a trail, the trail to a path, then to the beginnings of a road. Erezebet and her young lambling – Laliun – led me out to see for myself, and together we saw the dust their feet turned up. And we elders had a talk that moonrise, sat round the carvenstone to let the gods know our words were grave business and for all we’re a small village we’d be obliged if they were to listen…_

_So — no fires burnt in Shor’s Stone for five days and five nights. We hid our herds in the mine. And might be the gods listened, or may be that we elders made the right deciding, for the northerners’ army passed us by._

_But that does my mind no balm when I think at how they came from your way, by the Vernimwood road onward to us. We see and dread the same things a few times in our lives, Pirmun, if we live long enough to watch things echo, and this was a thing I’d seen once before. No raiding, this, but warfare. And I know what an army does to the land it moves through, and to anything smaller than it is._

_It’s hard for me to say after what’s already said, but need is seldom easy, and must and ought are scarce anything but hard doings. I’ve let your choices sit in me. There are batches of cheese that seem botched from the beginning but given time and a short while of forgetting, they can turn to something better. Such is the way with your choices. I make no mind now that you chose the north road after we gave your atya to the sky. And it matters for none to me that you went footling and nameless, without deed or clan to take with you to bigger towns and other trades and foreign ways. I only want to know as you’re safe in them, and happy in them — safe most of all._

_This is no outreached hand with forgiveness rested on its palm. There’s no forgiveness needs giving now, I think. Only Kyne-be-good, I wish you’d fare well, and hope you have been doing these past three years. For the Rift is changing – foreign armies passing into our heartplains; portent-strange glass, black as coal, veining our mine’s iron, like the land’s blood’s got some new sickness in it maybe – and I only hope that the Eastmarch benefits and that you, a trader or tradesman in Eastmarch, will benefit the same._

_Gods watch and keep you, Pirmun. My door stands open to you if some day you have need to return. My heart stands open, always and elsewise._

_Yours, Mata Six-Named, of the Stone-Seeder clan, mother of your mother, with love._

 

Back to the days of other people’s words in his own hand. A thing both like and far unlike the work that once he did for Torbjorn Shattershield. Simra told himself he wouldn’t have read the letter otherwise, but being as how he’d scribed it, more or less to the tune of old Mata’s dictation, he had no choice except to remember the words.

Most of it was water under the bridge to him and barely worth a second thought. Only small town fear at seeing the big world turn on and on without them. What stuck like a splinter in his mind was forgiveness. Whatever this Pirmun had done, his grandmother forgave him, wished him well, wanted only to know he was safe and well fed. And he’d been gone far longer than Simra…

In Vernimwood, forgiveness would be more trouble than it was worth. Simra wanted not to be forgiven but forgotten. Here, he was the grey-faced elf who’d come feral in from the dark one night and gone out on the trail of a troll the next day. Who, a few days after, had come back hale and fine whilst one of Vernimwood’s own lay barrowed in a cave, witnessed by none but a knot of woods and the hungry mouths of foxes. Here, he’d been cheated by the local trade-reeve and cheated the bastard right back. Two years had passed since then, but Simra worried that they’d remember. In the stead of any and all of that, he wanted to be no-one — another traveller come and gone.

The fields were bright and dry and fragrant. Ears of grain hung harvest-ready on their tight-packed stems. Patches of drooping white flower-heads blossomed amongst the current crops, flecked with strays of scanty blade-like petals, purple amidst the cream. Millet and buckwheat for Summer; oats and rye for the Autumn harvest.

Simra walked the trail between their rows and plottings. The fields were empty and silent except for the sound of the wind. The only motion was up above, where buzzards hung, watching for rabbits and mice. But here at least the sky had grown smaller, more narrow at every near horizon of hill or rise or treeline.

“Eastmarch,” he reckoned aloud. “Definitely Eastmarch all over again.” He scented the air. Whether for fields and farming, or else for the land itself, even the smell was different.

Ahead lay the warren of ridges that marked most of Vernimwood’s dwellings, dug out under the ground as trenches and pits. With no snow to cover them this time, he saw their light-thatched roofs. From half-hidden chimneys here and there, smoke rose in hairline trails and teased the air through with the scents of cooking.

Beyond the web of dug-outs stood the old curtain-wall, built from man-tall slabs of black Eastmarch stone. Man-small shapes shifted on the wall-top. Hasty-made parts of wooden barriers and jagged caltrops stood idle by the roadside, ready to be hurried together in Vernimwood’s defense.

A shrill horn-call split the silence. A moment later, out from a wickered postern gate came two watchmen. They hustled down the track towards Simra. From atop the walls, he could feel other eyes on him, mantling and dismantling.

He couldn’t help but see himself as they did. An off-cream and broider-hemmed tunic hung on his narrow torso, sleeves opened up and rolled above his elbows. Draped and tied by the arms round the straps and bodies of his satchel and gathersack, and knotted round his waist, there were his mantle and rust-red aketon, too hot to wear for weeks now. On one wrist, a loop of bright red beads; on the other, a crude bracelet of twisted copper wire. A copper arm-ring shaped like a green-bellied snake coiled round his left forearm.

The two watchmen were sweating under their tall Eastmarch helmets. No uniform. Not even in the motley sense of Ulfric Stormcloak’s blue levies. These were only townsfolk, armed and armoured as best they could manage. Their best, Simra noted, was better than most. One had a long canvas-fronted shield strapped to his left arm – teardrop-shaped, to cover the legs as well as the body – and carried a winged boar-hunting spear. The other gripped a long two-handed axe halfway down its haft.

Simra came to a halt, waiting for them. Let them tire themselves out. Let them sweat. But on instinct, he was sweating too, no matter how he told himself these men were not like the guards of upcity Windhelm. He couldn’t help but remember the time on the Kingsway, calling for Soraya, afraid she wouldn’t come…

“Who goes?” asked the watchman with the spear. Relieved, he came to a stop, setting the lower point of his shield at rest against the ground.

“Name’s Simrin.” Half the truth and half a lie, Simra told it without thinking.

“And your business in Vernimwood?” The other guard hefted his axe so its haft was couched against his shoulder. A casual pose, but Simra knew enough swordplay to reckon an axe could strike down hard from that position just the same as a blade might.

“Travelling through. Going on to Windhelm to take ship from there, but I was hoping to stop by Vernimwood a night or so — got a letter for someone lives here.”

A pause as they eyed him from behind the nose-guards of their helmets. Beneath them, Simra noticed, both watchmen were old. Grey and grizzled beards hedged out from their chins. Their skin was lined. The fire of their eyes was pale and faded. They were the leftovers, neither conscripted by their jarl, nor gone away on the Summer raids.

“There is a Pirmun lives here in Vernimwood?” Simra carried on, trying for a smile. “Right?”

“Sveyar..?” said the one with the spear. “He’s got a sword, Sveyar. He’s armed…”

It hung there on Simra’s left hip, roped haphazard to his sash, scabbard knotted round with his old patchwork scarf — the one that had been Gitur’s before it was ever his.

The watchman named Sveyar thumbed the haft of his weapon in thought. “So’s anyone with any sense, walking the roads in Summer.” He turned back to Simra, lowering his axe to the ground, and setting an idle foot on its heavy head. “You’ll find Pirmun Salt-Scourged in his cure-pit.”

“I’d thank you if you could tell me where I’d find the cure-pit then?” Or, for that matter, what a cure-pit even was, or looked or smelt like…

“Out-of-towners,” snorted Sveyar. “You want directions, pay some young scrap who’s still got the knees for it. Some of us have work to do.”

“…And standing still to do while we’re doing it,” grinned the other watchman as they forked paths round Simra, one on either side of him.

“Sitting still and out of the gods-cursed sun…” Sveyar agreed.

They escorted Simra toward the postern and through a cool dark cranny in the wall, buckling into single file to fit the narrow tunnel. Before the tunnel was finished, the two watchmen stopped at a hollowed out nook halfway along where a cup-laden table, chairs, and a tapped cask of beer were nestled.

“On your way,” said Sveyar, waving a hand at the tunnel’s far end as he eased down into one of the chairs. “Make no trouble and you’ll get none from us, lad. On your way now.”

Simra nodded his thanks, finished the last stretch of tunnel, and stepped out into the morning shade of Vernimwood’s walled heart. Penned pigs and market stands. Voices hawking loud in Marchspeak. The sweet and yeast-sour scent of baking bread…

“Fuckin’ ‘lad’ me…” muttered Simra under his breath. “‘Lad’ me a-fuckin’-gain an’ I fuckin’ swear you’ll have no more lads of your own. ‘Lad’. Hhuh…”


	67. Chapter 67

“There?”

“There. That’s the one. No good came of it last time he came this way, though mind you I tried at warning them, and mind me now: if he’s come again, there’s worse things yet in the works.”

Simra felt it at first as a tingling in his scalp, beneath where his hair had grown long and rebellious. Eyes on him and voices speaking behind his back. There were folk talking about him in words not meant for his hearing. Even past the murmur of the small marketplace, he could make them out. One voice – the one talking too much while the others listened – was familiar in a way that hooked and hitched in his guts and turned all his thoughts to thoughts of running.

“Can’t be too certain,” that voice continued. “Not round his type. Cursed, all of them, and baba – Kyne carry her soul – always said to me: Pavol, curses are catching. Can’t be too careful.”

“And…you’d have us do..? What exactly?”

Simra knew the answer before it came. His knees locked. His hands stilled wooden and awkward at his sides.

“The greyling robbed me!” Pavol burbled. “Paid for what I gave in kindness with two-thirds charmed coins! And after he was gone, do you know, a whole cask of my smallbeer had turned sour? Were I on watch I’d seize him no sooner than he’d shown that weasel’s face at our gates, I swear it by the grudges my ancestors held and the grudges I hold to this day!”

The stall-holder in front of Simra had lifted her eyes from the trough of summer-greens and dirt-dusted purple carrots that squat between them. Now she stared past Simra, toward the voices, their push and footsteps as they shouldered through the crowd. Slow and uneasy, Simra turned to look.

Pavol’s hair had grown close to bald these last two years. Only cobweb scraps and strands still clung to his scalp beneath the weathered fur hat he wore despite the sun. His weak chin hung slack. The bags beneath his eyes were loose and hung the same, but his eyes themselves were steely aglint with triumph. Two watchmen stood either side of him. One was the spearman from the postern gate. The other was new: an old woman with cropped grey hair and a hook-backed hammer, wearing a leather apron, a jangling belt of iron disks, ornaments of dull metal, tools and keys.

Simra’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “Shit…” the word hissed out. His eyes flit across the marketplace to where the main gate stood on its far side — closed up with wicker-screen doors. He could run for the warrens that led beyond the walls, but they’d chase him, and they knew the maze of tunnels and trenches better than him by far. “Shit…” Just like in Windhelm, running was as good as admitting guilt, and fighting was worse still. They would put a spear in him. They would riddle his back with arrows. His mother’s words came to him: don’t give them cause.

He raised his hands, showing them empty, and tried for a smile. The spearman only lowered the tip of his weapon at him, level with his belly. The woman with the hammer and the clanking belt skirted round to his side. The market had fallen quiet around them, and hedged prickling with watchful eyes.

“Simrin, now, is it?” Pavol crooned. “And to think when last you were here, we had nothing to call you but ‘Harmless.’ Well, now I’ve got a better name to curse you by, haven’t I, greyling?”

The spearman’s eyes flickered from Simra back to Pavol, searching for cue or command.

For Simra the fear was late in coming, but now it came in thick and cold, overbearing for all it waited. It was a twisting weight and an urge in his belly, and an easeless liquid feeling everywhere below. It was a head filled with curses and empty of ideas. If he tried to fight, they’d kill him before he could draw steel or cast a spell. If this was how he died—… If this was where he died—… He’d been going home. He’d been trying—…

“Take his weapons, throw him in the cooler,” said Pavol. “I want him guarded, d’you hear me?”

They heard. While the spear circled lines in the air in front of Simra’s chest, stomach, face, the woman unknotted his swordbelt, brusque, and yanked away the patchwork scarf with it.

“Boot,” muttered the spearman, nodding down.

The woman stooped in hard silence to snatch away the spearhead knife from where it was bound to his left calf. She took the skinny wand from his right. Then she wrenched away his bags, his bundled outerclothes.

They took him by the arms. Simra’s left flared up with a grinding pain. There — a grip on his forearm, against the old break.

“Have a fucking care..!” he hissed, struggling to jerk his arm back.

The woman slammed a fist into his side. The air went from him with a ragged gulp. A sick green pain put inkblots in his vision. It blurred the tunnels they passed through to the brink of blindness. And then he was tumbling, limb over limb, skinning his palms and bruising his knees. He fell with face grit and hot, stinging against the cooler’s cold dirt floor. 

Simra unbundled himself. He’d landed a tangle of limbs but now he sprawled onto his back. His breathing was spare and harsh. It ached cold in his throat, like he’d just run a span that was longer than his limits. The pain in his side, just below his lowest ribs, had turned to an acrid throb. He’d have a bruise there for his backtalk, that much was clear. But they hadn’t killed him. He told himself that til it felt like a victory, then over again til the victory turned hollow.

“Stupid…” he rasped.

The fear had ebbed. Under it, he might’ve expected to find anger. A flickerflash of rage at the walls around him and the men and women and words that’d put him there. Simra slapped an open hand against the ground beneath him. The scream that growled up in his throat came out instead as a sigh. There was no fury to vent. Just a cold disdain, come from within and burrowing further inward. He’d come to a town where he’d wronged the trade-reeve. Whether Pavol had wronged him first made no difference. A rich man can afford to hold grudges, and anyone poorer might gain much by helping. What else had he expected?

Time passed. Afternoon sunlight fell in fragments through holes in the woven branches and layered turf of the cooler’s roof. The room beneath, tight around him, was more a pit than a cell. If it weren’t dug so deep he could have reached up, worried a hole in the roof, and pushed straight through to freedom. The stooped and narrow door was up on a waist-high ledge. He might have burnt through, but Pavol had said for someone to keep guard, and where would he run to after?

At some point he’d slept. Must have, for he woke to darkness, and scraps of silver moonlight streaming down from the ceiling. One thought had jolted him to and pushed escape from his mind. If he ran, he’d lose it all. They’d taken his bags and sword and clothes. They’d taken every coin he had, except the light hidden reserve of silver shillings he’d sewn into the inner thigh of his trousers, and the couple more he had in his left boot.

Simra choked back a misshapen sound, somewhere between a barking laugh and a sob. Near enough everything he’d bought, gained, worked for — all that would be gone…

Gone unless he played their game, he thought as he woke again, later. He was empty-bellied with a morning hunger and morning light hung grey all about him. The cold light brought clarity. Pavol hadn’t killed him where he stood. And though Simra grimaced, trying not to blanch and retch at the thought, neither had he gone to a butcher and lopped off a hand or a handful of fingertips, then turned him loose. There was a game being played here.

“Just need to learn the rules…” Simra whispered to himself, shunting on his rear over to a wall and pushing his back up against it. “Can’t win if you dunno how to play…”

“Quiet back there.” A boy’s voice. Not one he recognised, and younger than anyone he’d yet seen in Vernimwood. They’d changed the guard. The boy wrapped a boot against the woven wicker door, making it shake. “I won’t have you working curses on me for how Vesela was kind enough not to pull out your tongue with her forge-tongs.”

Talking to himself and only half-awake, Simra barely noticed what language the words came in, but by the boy’s reaction he’d slipped into the Grey Quarter’s patois. Kissing his teeth, Simra snorted in hollow amusement, before carrying on in the same tongue:

“Just like a Nord. Take any foreign words for witchcraft.”

“I’m warning you, elf! I’ll come back there…” But the youth made no move to open the door.

“Not while you’re pissing yourself at the prospect of me cursing your bleach-pale little balls off you won’t.”

“I’ll fetch Pridbor..!”

“Right, sure, fair’s fair. Run to your deda or whoever the fuck Pridbor is and have ‘im tell the nasty elf to stop speaking his mothertongue ‘cos of how it puts the piss up you. Really fucking enlightened of you, that. Courageous too. Dunno why you’re knocking round in a shit-pit town like this. You’re fucking wasted here. Intellect like yours? Valiant as you are? You could be guarding cells in Windhelm!”

A moment of silence passed. Just enough for Simra to worry the boy had run, and was bringing someone with more sense and less superstition to them. “You’re not gone then?” he asked tentative in Marchspeak, when the silence stretched too thin.

“I ain’t afraid of you or your witching,” came the boy’s sullen voice. “I prayed to the nine big gods already this morning, and I’ll pray at the little ones later.” He said it like it was meant to be a threat. “There’s not a curse you might call down can worm through all that…”

The boy didn’t sound convinced. Nor was Simra. “Dunno a lot about your gods but…I don’t reckon that’s how they work.”

“No matter. Just me then. That’s fine. I’m standing where I was charged, you mark me. No man or woman in Vernimwood will fault Pirmun Salt-Scourged for a coward and a breaker of—”

“Pirmun!” Simra sputtered. Laughter rose rattling-dry up from deep in his belly. A joke. Someone – one of the gate-guards? – had to be playing a trick on the both of them. “You’re Pirmun!?”

“What if I am?” The boy sounded more clueless than ever before.

“You mean,” Simra wheezed between helpless giggles, “you’re the Pirmun? The only one in Vernimwood? I’ve—…Oh fuck…” Simra struggled to catch his breath as the laughter became a trickling chuckle. “I’ve got a letter for you. Reason I came this way in the first blighted place.”

“A letter?” the boy echoed dumbly.

“Right. Words on paper, containing a message or missive? Bright lad like you are, surely you know your runes like the back of your hand?” Simra smirked in the shade of his cell.

Pirmun didn’t answer the question in his hurry to ask his own. “Who from? What saying?”

“Your grandame sends her love,” Simra teased, switching back to the patois he’d grown up speaking. “That’s about the short of it.”

“When the time for speaking is come, elf, you’ll speak Nordic like a decent person!” the boy fumed. Coming from a disemboided voice, the ire and threat came empty — almost laughable.

“You’re a Riftman, aren’t you Pirmun? You know well as I do there’s no one such thing as ‘Nordic’ where tongues are concerned.”

“The letter!” Pirmun snapped in response, breaking into Riftspeak as if on cue. Only now did Simra notice how strange and clumsy his accent had been before. “Who sent the blasted letter?”

“Your…Ugh…” Simra didn’t know the word in Riftspeak. “Your mother-mother…No. Mother’s mother?”

“Danya..!”

“…I thought her name was Mata?”

“No, no, it is. Just – uh – ‘danya’ means—… Anyway, where is it? What’ve you done with it?”

“Question is, what’ve you done with it?” Simra moved back to Marchspeak. “I didn’t fucking confiscate my own bags, did I?”

“No,” said Pirmun, following suit. “I suppose you didn’t.”

“D’you suppose you can get them back for me?”

“And risk hackling up Pavol the way that you did?” Pirmun gave a short laugh, humourless and lasting barely past the syllable it was made from. “No chance. I’d as well pack my things now and start running. It’ll have to wait…”

“For what?”

“For your trial, I think? Maybe once it’s done, I can—”

“What trial? I’m getting a trial?” Simra frowned, suspicious of a sudden. “…Why am I getting a trial?”

“Pavol is…well, he’s trade-reeve for Vernimwood. That means he’s the yard-rule every tradesman and trader here has to be measuring themselves by. He…I suppose he needs to…keep up appearances?”

“You mean he needs to look just and fair so he can keep screwing everyone else for every copper he can?”

“You didn’t hear it from me, alright? But – uh – …”

“Right. So. Even grudgesworn enemies get a trial. Right. Far be it from me to complain. What kind of trial?”

“Whatever kind you choose, I suppose…”

“Oh. That kind.” Simra’s gut dropped again. He’d heard the stories, read the poems. He knew. “Choice of trial by the land’s own ancient laws and the law of its high-king? Trial by word and witness before the eyes of men, or trial by steel and shield in view of the gods?” Simra curled his lip. The quotation dripped sarcastic. “That kind of trial?”

“I suppose…”

“Do a lot of supposing, don’t you, Pirmun?” Simra’s lip curled. “Shit…”

“Three shields,” said Pirmun after a time — thoughtful, like he was concluding something, correcting something. “In a trial by steel you get three shields.”

“Oh and that’s a great fucking help, I’m sure!”


	68. Chapter 68

The choice of trials was a mockery. Straight and simple, it was only the latest joke of the many Simra felt had been nipping at his heels all this last long while. He could stand and make a case that was no case, speaking for himself before a jury of elders and children, and hedge up on the vainhope that more than half of them would take his side. The side of a stranger – an elf – over the word of a local whose whims could make them rich or poor, easy as scritching with a pen or tipping the pans on a set of scales.

“…Or I fight some hoary-bearded Nord with three or four times the Summers I’ve seen weighing on his shoulders,” Simra said. His voice was dry from thirst. His lips were cracked and sore. “Let them see in my triumph or defeat the will of their gods and the truth that they’d have known.” In the stories, that was how it went. He was hungry enough by now that everything felt beaten thin, like wrought silver hammered towards being a mirror. An irony stitched through everything and bled into his speech.

A silence. A jolt as Simra began to worry.

“Pirmun..? Shit, don’t tell me they’ve changed the guards and I’m here fucking…soliloquising to—!”

“I’m still here.”

“Thanks fucking be,” Simra breathed.

A shuffle sounded out from behind the wicker door of Simra’s cell. Two days now he’d spent in the cooler beneath Vernimwood, and twice Pirmun had come and gone. He’d still seen nothing more of the boy than a shifting of shade and shape through the latticed cell door.

“I have something for you,” said Pirmun.

“Will the blessings never cease! Why didn’t you say so before!?”

“You didn’t give me a chance. You wouldn’t stop talking.”

“Shit…Well, what’m I being treated to today then? Water?” Simra’s voice rose, almost hoping higher than he dared. “…Food?”

“Just water.”

“Well fuck…Heard once it was shit manners round here to host a guest without offering them bread, right? Bread if they’re a stranger and salt too if they’re known. If I wasn’t known I’d not be in here, would I? I’d’ve given you your letter and passed on through, right?”

“I…suppose Pavol doesn’t think of you as a guest.”

“Yeah, that much is clear.”

Another sound came from behind the door. The sleek cree of pollard wood sliding against itself, bark on bark, and then a hesitation.

“If I come in there, give you your water, take your pot, you won’t…try anything, will you?” Pirmun asked.

“Stupid if I did,” Simra admitted. On his daily watches, Pirmun was the only person who’d been anything near kind to him since he’d arrived in Vernimwood. Since Simra had been closed up in the cooler, Pirmun’s was the only voice he’d heard. “So nah, you’re fine.”

The door creaked inward. A youth with a jaw-length sweep-back of dark brown hair squatted in the cut-earth frame. He held out a bottle-stoppered leather sack, swollen with the promise of water.

Simra blinked at Pirmun, trying to match the face to his voice, and to his grandmother’s letter. The off-black wisps of an attempted beard whiskered his chin, jaw, and upper lip. In the colour of his hair, his dark and hooded eyes, his broad unambitious face and narrow chin, he had some of the look of the Rift about him. But there was an Eastmarch pallor too, a red wind-chapped flush to his cheeks and thin lips. He wore an Eastmarch tunic with the neck unfastened, and loose Eastmarch trousers, not bound at the calves but rather tucked into high boots, soft with wear and long-caring use. His build was heavy, dense, powerful under all that. A long skinning knife hovered uncertain in his other hand.

“…You’re younger than I’d thought,” said Pirmun. When he frowned, his eyes narrowed, like half-suns setting into his full cheeks. “That is…you are, aren’t you? Youngish?”

“You’re…older.” Simra had expected a boy. Pirmun had perhaps a year or two on him if they weren’t of an age together. “Why’re you not off raiding with the others? With…Artyr, I’d guess?”

“Someone’s got to not,” Pirmun shrugged. “And besides, I – uh – don’t suppose that the carl would have me. She says I’m too green for it. Or she says I’m too new here and no man or woman in Vernimwood’d trust me by their side in a shieldwall. Things like that. Artyr gives her reasons. And that’s…I suppose that’s fine. No-one to mind my stock if I did go.”

“Artyr’s carl now? Since when’s Vernimwood had a carl?”

“Since – uhm – Artyr was it, I suppose.” Pirmun’s fingers worked at whatever they were holding while he spoke. Nerves. Like he’d be wringing his hands together if only he could. The kind of shyness that came with being laughed at or pitied whenever he spoke. “Listen. I shouldn’t be talking. People are bad enough already and—…Do you want the water or not?”

“Yes,” Simra hurried to say. Pirmun flinched back a little when he lunged up to take the water sack. “…Thank you,” Simra said, soft, like trying to calm a skittish pony.

Pirmun stepped wary inside to take the pot left for Simra, and then he was gone again. The wicker door closed. Simra heard no more from him that day. Only human voices in the fields above and the town down the tunnels, distorted by distance, wordless through the walls of earth around him.

Artyr had gone from reeve to carl, he reflected. As to the difference between a reeve and a carl, he’d never been sure. Except that a place like Vernimwood could have any number of squabbling reeves, but only ever one car at a time. Except that if Vernimwood was a carling now, and Ulfric Stormcloak had mustered his banners, Artyr wouldn’t be raiding — she’d be in the Rift with the others. If she’d been here, she might’ve vouched for him, remembering the use he’d been to her. But she was at war, and wouldn’t be back soon, if she came back at all. Simra would have to do what he could with what he had — whatever means, whatever allies.

Mostly Simra was left alone. In the mornings, muffled birdsong as sunlight slipped grey and cryptic through the gaps in his roof. Throughout each day the sounds of talk, field-songs and Summer work drifted down to him but didn’t quite reach. Daylight in the cooler was nothing so much as twilight. Night meant magelight or darkness.

He was being starved. No food for three days, four days, going on five. The irony of everything had long since turned bitter. Instead, things had gone to a daze. Words and thoughts, sights and sounds, strange and shrunken through fog. It only hurt sometimes, but when it did, the pain was a retching wrenching one, black and hook-handed in his belly. Through hunger, the hunger itself started to make sense.

“Pirmun?” Simra asked weak through the door. “You there?” He’d heard the guard change. It had to be him – had to be – or else someone else would hear him asking. Suspect something. Stop sending the boy from the Rift and have Simra guarded only in helpless silence from then on.

The quiet welled, grew, turned terrifying. Then it broke.

“I’m here,” said Pirmun through the door. He sounded wary. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising.

“Good.” Simra’s relief was a desperate thing. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising either. “Listen. If I chose the trial by combat – and being realistic for a moment, what choice’ve I got but that? – who would I be fighting?”

“Pavol, I suppose. That’s the way of it, usually.”

“Knew it… I fucking knew it.”

That was the way in the songs, the stories, the sagas. At least the ones Simra had read and heard. The duel must be between accuser and accused. Children, women-with-child, those infirm with age or sickness of the brain or body, and the dead — by the old ways of the Nords, only they could have a champion stand for them. If Pavol didn’t fight for himself, he’d be all but admitting infirmity, weakness. He’d compromise his rank, stupid as that seemed to Simra. Typical of Nords, how even a businessman has to prove themselves a warrior now and then — fight something, endure something, lift something heavy…

“I can smell bread baking. Meat cooking and vegetables roasting. Pots simmering. Seems like all the time. All the fucking time.” Simra’s lips were raw from the way he’d started licking them, mouth watering, mouth dry. On cue, his stomach snarled and knotted. “So don’t try tell me he’s starving me out of any scarcity. He’s starving me ‘cos he’s scared.”

“He…” Pirmun hesitated. Simra imagined him glancing down the tunnel, searching for listeners-in and eavesdroppers. “Pavol always was one to, uh…Well, it’s seldom he’ll make a deal without a finger on the scales, if you take my meaning? To tip them for him?”

“Part of his plan. All part of his plan. A fucking blight on him. His bones and bloodline, wife and house, children born and children yet to fucking be. Ghosts and gods and listening spirits shrivel his fucking stones and shrink his eyes to jelly then dust, the goat-fucking shit-kicking fly-blown bastard son of a bastard son of a fucking—…Oh..! Oh fuck…”

Simra’s snarl became a whimper as his belly joined in the growling. Pain. The same black pain and a dawning dread. Pavol was going to kill him. Not then and there in the marketplace, but he’d kill him all the same. In what stories or poems did these duels end in anything but death? They were trial and punishment both at once — the judging and the justice. Pavol would starve him weak, and then—…

“Is that meant to fucking honour him?” Simra’s voice was fast dying to a whimper. “Killing me himself, in front of anyone wants to watch? An old man fighting someone half-starved to prove a fucking point and stroke off his own blighted pride? Crowshit… It’s not—… It’s not fucking—…”

“…Fair?”

“And yet he’s doing this to prove what a fair man, he is? A righteous man. An honourable man you can all trust? Shit. Fucking shit. How do you bear it?” Simra asked, already knowing the answer. He’d been born beneath the weight of that answer. Lived with it every day of his childhood in the Grey Quarter. Powerlessness couldn’t stand against power. What ought to be can so seldom rise against what is and always has been.

“Pavol isn’t a good man,” said Pirmun, quiet and slow. “But he holds the town together. Helps those as help him. I don’t suppose I’m the only one who prays it might be different, but…”

“Listen. Pirmun, fucking listen to me.” Simra’s voice built heat, gathering it to him, like a forge-fire turning steel from sullen red to glaring yellow. The desperation in his voice had turned manic. Grim and visionary. He scrambled over to the door, hissing through it. “Two years ago I came to this town, chased through the night by a monster. This monster’d trapped you all. Kept your from your fields. Walled up and buried in your own homes. It had you all strangled, starving, un-fucking-free, like weeds that grow and choke a tree. I came, I went out, and I killed your monster. That was the first time. Let me do it again, Pirmun. Help. Me.”

“I can’t. I mean—…I—… How?”

“Feed me? I’m not asking for much. I can do the rest. Just don’t let him starve me.”

“What does that gain me?” Pirmun whispered. Simra had forgotten til then that he was a tradesman, a merchant. “What do I get if I do? It’s a risk.”

“You get to watch me kill that bastard!”

“Someone else would have to take his place. Dobrozd or Engemir, I suppose, or Brondanr. They would be just as bad.”

“So what else d’you want? You haven’t said no yet. You’re still listening. So there’s something.”

“I want – uhm – I’d like to know what my danya had to say to me.”

“I can tell you.”

“I want to know what she said, the way she said it.”

“Like I said, I can tell you! I—…” Simra frowned, creasing his brow and biting his lip as he thought. “I can remember.”

“That’s shit. You’re shitting me. Trying to crook me,” said Pirmun. “…How?”

“I wrote it down, right? Wrote her letter for her. I wrote it, so I remember. The writing… Uhm…the writing helps, alright? No more impressive than what your bards do, is it? Recite from memory?”

“It…I want the letter,” Pirmun said, reluctant. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“Listen. Your danya can’t write, can she? It’s not her handwriting. Written or spoken, either way it comes through me. Please, Pirmun..? Please…”

“Alright. I’ll see what I can—… Alright.”

Simra fell onto his back. A grin stretched out his sunken cheeks and cracked his dry-stung lips. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you…”

“Now, Simra. I have the time to listen, and I won’t feed you for nothing but empty promises. I want it now.”

Simra squinted up at the wicker and thatch of the ceiling. Dust floated in each pale fall of daylight. He closed his eyes, trying to think, trying to recall.

_“To Pirmun, son of my daughter, and to be opened by no hand but his…”_

Once he began, it was easy. A flow that was harder to stop than it was to continue. His memory had always been a good one. What else did he have, really?


	69. Chapter 69

For five days, Simra starved. The sixth brought rain, thunderous and season-spiteful. It filled the whole sky with drowning grey noise. It hid the sun and stole away the last bare scraps of twilight that, for Simra, had divided day from night. His reckoning of time distended and disjointed. Only the changings of the guard, and Pirmun’s comings and goings gave Simra any sense of each passing day.

Lit strange by cold-stark magelight, Simra swallowed and swallowed, and tried to make himself chew. He crouched in the pit where they meant him to wither and shrink and weaken. Instead he was feasting. Mouth filled with salt and the tough dark savour of dried meat, Simra was blissed beyond words, thankful beyond thought.

“Ghosts..!” he groaned, happy. A hardy lump sank awkward down his throat. He tilted back his head, raised his chin, easing it. His stomach stormed its surprise. What had closed up in the effort of forgetting itself clenched and gnawed at the food he gave it, learning to open up and eat again. “What is this?”

“Venison,” said Pirmun. “Salt-dried. It’s been hot enough for that. Juniper too, and some nutmeg in the cure, though less than I would like.”

“It’s good. It’s really good. I was expecting…I don’t know what I expected. Stale bread. Vegetable scraps and slops. This is—…” Meat. A luxury. Something Simra never would’ve shared with a stranger. “Where’d you get it?”

Pirmun was silent a moment, behind the cell-door. Simra bit away another tear of meat from the strip he held rattish in both his hands.

“Oh!” Pirmun started. “You’re really asking? I thought you might have supposed… I made it. Make it.”

“Fuck…” Simra swallowed again and blew a few stray hairs from his face. His cheeks flushed. He’d been slow there, and stupid, and hunger was only half an excuse. “Pirmun Salt-Scourged. Fuck! Of course. You’re a—…Shit, I don’t know the word. You preserve meats and things, right?”

“It’s not much of a deed-name, I suppose, but it’s the best I’ve done anything to deserve.”

The rain leaked into the cooler through its roof of thatch and turf. Pools of water shivered on the packed dirt ground. Slow and to the sound of rainfall, the floor melted to mud.

“If you were a sailor – a seafarer – it’d sound pretty well, right?” Simra said. “Sounds like cresting waves. Weathering storm and salt-spray, right?”

“I suppose… I’ve never been to sea though. Never even seen it. Have you?”

Simra furrowed his forehead and found himself wanting to lie. It’d be easy to seem worldly and well-travelled in front of someone who’d seen so little. “Sort of,” he admitted instead. “I’m from Windhelm. Grew up a little way down the mouth of a river but – uhm – I suppose I never saw past its teeth.” He paused, puzzling back what he’d just said. “Does…does that make any fucking sense? Sorry…”

To say he’d seen the ocean would be like living all his life in this pit and saying he’d seen the sun when all he’d really known were its ghosts and glimmers. All the same, he remembered the Windhelm docks and the things the sea brought to them. 

The riverboats and seagoing ships, and all the folk from all over the world. Haafings from east along the coast of Skyrim, who scraped their beards clean off to look like Heartlanders and wore fluttering cloaks of three-coloured fabric, textured like feathers but made from cloth. Bretons from Eastern High Rock with their hair in scent-oiled curls, patterns in the warp and weft of their tasseled shawls, and their fingertips stained sky-blue or emerald-green for the sheer look of it. Traders from Hammerfell who covered their hair and wrapped their heads with scarves, even while their arms and torsos were bare of anything but the sweat-sheen of their work.

The Haafings, he remembered, brought precious stones and iron and traded for grain and potatoes. The Bretons sold fine lacework, cages full of songbirds, messenger-birds, and went home weighed down with leather, parchment, wood and pitch from firtrees. The Redguards sold spices Simra would likely never taste, cotton cloth, and fine glasswork wadded in crates of cloth-scraps, and went home with empty ships and full pockets…

He thought of the Morayat, and the drumming songs and dancing that haunted its nights. He thought of the Grey Quarter, past it and beyond the docks, and reminded himself he was still going home.

Chew, Simra thought. Remember to chew. His mother’d always said he wouldn’t get the full benefit of whatever food he had if he wolfed it. Let your teeth and tongue get to know it first — they’ll teach you and your belly gratitude. He ate as slow as he could make himself eat but soon the food was gone. The salt of the meat made him thirsty, but half-drowned in rain, what he had in plenty was water.

Another cycling of the guards. The day began in rain, passed with wet and hissing intervals, and ended in clattering showers. For all these past two Summer days seemed mocks of themselves, the rain did nothing to cool the heat. The warmth only turned solid, pressive and over-familiar, damp on Simra’s skin like the air itself was sweating.

Flies moved fat and humming from puddle to puddle. Every time Simra began to sleep, quickening the time til he was fed again, he felt something crawling on him and jerked awake. Flies or phantom flies, or bloodflies ready to bite, he barely slept, and spent his waking hours wishing he knew a cantrip to keep the little bastards at bay.

That evening, Pirmun snuck Simra a hunk of tough salty ham, and came with news. “It’s tomorrow,” he said. “Probably almost definitely. That’s what everyone’s been saying to each other. There’s a fallow field outside the walls. I heard they’ve been laying out a ring.”

Tomorrow. Tomorrow felt too soon. Simra had been rain-damp for days now, and two frenzies of scant eating scarce makes up for five-and-some days of hunger. He was still slow, still stupid, still weak. And Pavol was still old, at least as afraid as he was, and expecting still less than what he could give. Tomorrow at least meant no more waiting. No more of this.

“A ring…They’ve not even asked me which way I’ve chosen yet! Not that there’s any need, but it would’ve been nice to’ve been asked…” Simra huffed to hide the quaver in his voice. “You ever seen them do this before?”

“Once. Two years ago, I suppose, when I was still new to Vernimwood.”

“How’s it work? I know the stories, some poems, but…hard to say what’s real or recent with them, right? …What happened? Two years ago, I mean.”

“A husband and a wife. She said she knew he’d been untrue and he said he hadn’t, so I suppose it was his word against hers, and she was raged enough that this seemed like the only way. So they made a ring, only it was really a triangle. Three spears, end-against-end, three corners. Accuser sets down one rule, so she said, like’s customary when the accuser can’t think of any other preference. No casting of spells, no use of any alchemy or herbwork of any sort. Accused chooses weapons, so he said: ‘axes, bring me mine and bring her hers.’”

“Crowshit… The rule. What happens if anyone breaks it?”

“I’ve never seen it done, but I suppose they – uh – lose. Forfeit.”

“Meaning they’re fucking dead, right?”

“They die without honour…”

“Piss on the fucking honour, I’ll take the not-dying, thanks very-fucking-much!” Simra’s voice stretched thin and shrill. He’d forgotten about the rule. He knew what Pavol would choose. “So what happened? To the wife and her husband, I mean?”

“Oh… Oh – uh – they got through two shields each before she got past his third. Put an axe right there…”

“I can’t fucking see you, Pirmun.”

“Oh. Between his eyes. Three weeks later, she – uh – had to have a leg taken. She took a blow there and the bone went sour, I suppose. So it came off.”

“Over a fucking…suspicion? Stupid…”

“She won, so I suppose it wasn’t a suspicion at all. It was the truth.”

“Ghosts and bones…” Simra breathed. “Stupid! Stupid stupid…” The first was for tradition, honour, ideals, Nord justice. The second two were for him — his own stupidity. Pavol could rule away his magic. And in turn he could choose…what? Swords? But even that was too even a field to risk fighting on.

Pirmun left. Simra tried to sleep, but instead his brain fell busy with dreaming.

The alley again, chased to ground. Ilmas and Llor Barsatim. A knife-tip, past the point of pain and the parting of his flesh, scraping hard against his teeth. Ostwulf telling him, broken and trapped at the bottom of the world, teaching him the wisdom those wounds had won him. Make a point. Show them no prize is worth what crossing you will cost them. Not vengeance, nor honour, nor anything else… Show them, Simra. Let them see.


	70. Chapter 70

“Greyling? Greyling. Elf! Wake up. Wake up, it’s time.”

Simra was already awake. His sleep had been thin as springtime ice, barely worth the rest it gave him. Hunched and bedraggled all the same, he was crouched in the center of his cell. Raising a hand towards its open door, he peered blinking through his parted fingers at the guard stood in its frame. The tall and grey-haired woman that had taken his things stooped in the doorway, hammer held idling but ready.

“It’s time,” she repeated, uneasy. Defunct and off-guard. She’d been sent to wake him and found him awake.

“Course it fuckin’ is…” Simra slurred. Straightening up and onto his feet, he dusted himself off as best he could. No mud on him, though so much of his cell was wet and flyblown muck. That was good.

The woman eyed him suspicious. Simra imagined a question hovering just behind her teeth. ‘You’re clean. How?’ Magic would be the truth. He’d squatted above the dirt every waking hour he could, and whenever he had to lay down to sleep, he’d called a haze of heat out from inside his twisting belly, baking a portion of floor to dust rather than mud so as not to soil his clothes. He’d kept himself mostly clean with cantrips cast from rainwater and used them often — there was little enough else to do in his cell. He could have answered the question she never asked. Instead he gave a thin, scarred smirk, and kept his silence.

“Nothing funny,” she warned him, and led him through the tunnels beneath Vernimwood, under the walls of its keep.

Easy to feel confident and clever when faced with one nervous-staring Nord. Moving through the shadows with her at his back, Simra felt less certain. A nascent feeling coiled in him, tight and restless beneath his ribs. The guard pushed him up a short slope and out into the sunshine. The feeling bloomed out, deciding what it would be. Fear. A tremble-gut fear of the voices that heckled him. A slurry-kneed fear at the dozens of Nords arrayed around the courtyard. A lure to frenzy in all their stares and a flee-tempting terror at knowing what was to come.

Pavol stood at the small courtyard’s far end, washed-out pale in the sun. His cheeks and nose were drink-flushed and his hound-heavy eyes were gaping wide. He wore a fleece-lined jacket despite the heat, knuckle-long splints of dull-grey iron sewn into its front, its collar, its shoulders. 

Simra had tried to plan and predict and make himself ready. Faced with the crowd, his thoughts ran empty, like a scared animal voiding its guts. It was a falling moment. Shoulders hunched and legs bunching, mid-flinch, Simra was frozen.

“Simrin!” Pavol tried for a bellow above the crowd’s clamour. The result instead was reedy. “You stand accused in the sight of the gods and the eyes of men.”

Not so much as a mention of what he stood accused of. Not even a real name to bear those accusations. That helped him feel distant. Sometimes, in stories, people claimed to be beside themselves. Always a fever-pitch for them — that was what it always described. Beside himself now, Simra found a kind of peace in that far-off feeling. Funny, how they didn’t even know his real name. Mock upon mock upon mockery.

“Whose judgement do you choose?” Pavol continued. “The gods above, or the men and women here?”

Simra glanced round. A small sea of pale faces raged on every side. There was Artyr’s family: her woman, her man, her two girls grown older now than when he’d last seen them. No recognition in their crowd-masked faces. Simra straightened, breathed in as if to call flame, steeling himself. Then he spoke:

“Be an idiot to be tried by you. Let’s see if your gods’ll treat me any better.” The crowd drew in a short breath, then broke out into hollers, gabbling. “What rule d’you choose to hide behind?” He needed this bluster. A false-wind of fake courage. Perhaps these Nords would appreciate that. Perhaps he could believe it himself.

Pavol paced a few steps toward Simra. “I ask only for a fair fight.” Something in his face had tightened. A livid energy hung in his old man’s eyes. “No casting of spells. No poisons, no tinctures, no herblore or alchemy. A fair fight, mark my words! What weapons do you choose?”

That was nothing unexpected. Moments ago he might’ve dared hope for anything else, but now Simra turned away from Pavol to face the woman who’d led him here. “You. Bring my things. You took them, you ought to know where they are now.”

The woman glanced to Pavol then back to Simra.

“Go on.” Simra jerked his head to one side, gesturing away. “Don’t keep us waiting.”

The crowd fell to murmuring. Simra shifted in his boots, trying to stay distant from himself, calm and masked in confidence. Hadn’t he planned for this?

Pavol walked round the hole in the crowd. “We’ll go to the ring,” he announced impatient. “Those as wish to bear witness, follow me! Open the gates!”

Simra curled his lip and drew in a staggered breath. The main gates of Vernimwood cracked open. He rushed to walk beside Pavol and tried not to glance behind. By the sound at their backs, the whole crowd was filing out with them, in a muddy tramping of turnshod and unshod feet, down the dirt path and then between commonpatches and fields, all in sight of the black block walls, until the trailing crowd reached the ring. In the trod-down weeds and sun-glinting puddles of this scrap of fallow ground, a loose circle had been set out, marked by white-painted stones. Shields lay flat on the ground – bare and unfaced round boards – three on either side of the ring.

The woman with the hammer hurried to the ringside, sweat on her brow, and dumped Simra’s bags and clothes, swordbelt and weapons at its edge. He looked round the ring, counting in his head. Mustn’t seem too desperate. Mustn’t seem too eager. Slow, he stooped to his bags, searching. Someone had wrapped his spearhead and wand in a rag of cloth. A strange small kindness. He opened it up, then stood.

“I’ve chosen our weapons,” he said, voice carrying. “And I choose we fight with knives.”

The crowd’s response was a muddle. Blood-lust and confusion. A muscle twitched in Pavol’s neck. Like he’d hoped for something less intimate — a chance to kill at least at arm’s length. But he nodded to someone, who soon returned with a heavy-bladed cleaver.

The colour shifted pale in Simra’s face. A rushing filled his ears, like drawing close to a stream, drawing closer to find it was a river, then a torrent, hissing loud as a shout. He stooped again, head light and strange. When he came up once more, he was holding clothbound steel, a skinny drill-spiralling length of blade, chased with tin.

Battle-blood sick in Simra’s veins, everything was slow and thin. They were stood on either side of the circle now. He was shaking – must be, must be, for all he felt like trembling – but looking at his hands, he found they were still. And his arms were still and his knees were still. Was it the world that had started to throb and shudder?

His eyes were wide and over-focused. Simra saw Pavol take up his first shield, stand ready with its round weight outreached, cleaver hidden at its rim. He was saying something – shouting something – but Simra’s hearing was mussed and uncertain beneath the rush that filled his head. Someone tried to offer him a shield of his own. He flapped his left hand, dismissive, declining, knowing his barely-healed arm couldn’t bear its heft.

Simra settled into a crouch. Eyes fixed to eyes, he stared at Pavol. Hard to say who looked less certain. Low and ready, Simra held the spike of the wand in his right hand.

Pavol noised from across the ring. Blade-flat on shield-rim, clattering.

Simra’s fingers shifted.

Edging forward, shoulders hunched, Pavol moved in.

Hand raised, Simra found the third rune, and took aim. The sound it made was hardly a sound at all. The bolt it threw out was only a flickering in the air. But someone yelped. Pavol shrunk behind his shield, even as the wood splintered, twisting a breach through its own bulwark — like a bite, taken from out of its edge.

Pavol let go a thin howl. He charged. Again, Simra steadied his hand. This next bolt snarled through the iron boss of Pavol’s shield. This time the sound was sickening. Iron and wood tangled inwards, knitting through the flesh and bone of Pavol’s hand. Mangling. Merging.

Wailing, Pavol carried on forward, pain-mad, shield now flailing by his side and cleaver raised to cleave. Simra ducked low and leapt forward. His muscles remembered the Grey Quarter. Scrapping in its alleys for dusty ground and wounded pride. He tackled Pavol low, swiping at the old man’s right wrist with a hook of his left hand. Weight and motion, stagger and groan, they crashed to the ground. The wind went from Simra’s lungs. Pain blazed across his face as something struck him. He bared the grit of his teeth, wrestling with Pavol’s knife-hand. His right had forgotten the runes on the wand. Now he held only a shiv, and he stabbed with it.

Soft wet give into Pavol’s unarmoured side. A pile of limbs, they thrashed and struggled together. A sudden red mess at Pavol’s throat, down under the Nord’s weak chin. Soraya had told him once, ‘if someone’s worth knifing once, they’re worth knifing as many times as you can fucking well knife them.’ Simra didn’t stop. Not til Pavol did, falling still under him.

Hunched and breathing heavy, Simra came unsteady to his feet.

The crowd had gone a strange kind of silent. They saw him try to stand, and find he couldn’t stand still. He paced, panting, turning round, turning round. Every breath came out almost a laugh.

“Hha. Hhaa. Ohfuck… Ohfuckk…”

The elf pawed at his front, swearing in tongues. The welted start of a bruise stood out on one cheek, bleeding at one corner where the skin had broken. As they watched, he scrabbled and fumbled out of the red-stained ruin of his cream-coloured tunic. More like a wine-stained drunk, he stood before the crowd, all ribs and flutter-quick breathing, fretting at his clothes.

“See,” he babbled. “See, see! Sight of your gods, no spells no potions no poisons, right? See! Justaknife, gods fuck me up if I tell a lie, jussaknife, didn’t say a fuckin’ thing about any enchantments, just said choose a weapon, an’ I chose, right? I just chose…”

The crowd paused, unsure, like maybe they were waiting for retribution. But the sky was bright and blue and empty. No crash of thunder or falling weight. Just an elf, still talking too fast to follow, pacing and ha-ha-panting. And the corpse that had been Pavol, blood-drenched on the ground.

No roar of congratulations or affront. Just a murmur through the crowd. “Suppose we’ll need a new trade-reeve…” The dark-haired boy from the Rift, in his brine-stained clothes, with his salt-coarse hands may have started it, but by the time the crowd had started to thin, and sprawl off back to the town, those words were on everyone’s lips.


	71. Chapter 71

“Cold water,” said Pirmun. “Hot’s bad. Cooks the stain into the cloth, I suppose. Cold will take off the blood but won’t wash out the stain.”

Simra hunched over a bucket, dressed in his old tunic of dishwater grey, washing and dredging his new one through the water inside. He sat on the sun-dry turf, on the edge of Pirmun’s cure-pit and the nearby dug-out where he lived and slept. Pirmun worked in the pit below, crushing rocks of salt in a basin-big stoneware mortar. Between them, a section of roof had been peeled away. Sunshine streamed into the hole, already turning Pirmun’s neck and arms pink as the water in Simra’s bucket.

“Do you have soap? If you had some good soap, maybe you could rub out the stain too.”

Simra shook his head. “Nah. Used it all up a while back.” He’d turned it all to oil. Burnt through it in one night. Stupid. He carried on turning and massaging the cloth, forearm-deep in washwater. “And yeah, that’d be fine, if the one place that sells it round here would serve me…”

“Waleda’s commonplace room, you mean? I suppose you did kill her husband. I’m not surprised she’s sour with you.”

“Yeah…Funny how she’s not taking that as a favour yet.” Simra kissed his teeth. Kneeling, he tilted his weight to sit on his heels and straightened his back with a dull and bone-deep click. “Shit… Vinegar. Vinegar’d do it, I reckon… You salt things — know anyone who pickles whatever you can’t cure?”

Pirmun dusted salt from his hands. In measured dashes, he added herbs and spices to the mixture in his mortar. Nutmeg, black pepper, fennel, frost mirriam. “There’s Dermir,” he said, taking up a heavy pestle again to crush the seasonings into his salt. “But I don’t think Dermir likes me very much…”

Simra gave a huff. “Does anyone in Vernimwood?”

“Uhm.” The beat and grind of Pirmun’s work stopped. An injured pause. “Only when they’ve got more meat than they can eat before it goes bad. Or when they’re hungry and have no meat at all, I suppose.”

A little too late, Simra saw his own misstep. An apology trapped itself between his teeth but never struggled free. “Could try buy some. A few coppers ought to get me enough.”

“You’re an outsider here, as much as me. The difference is that I’ve not shown everyone how thin my honour is, the way that you have.” Pirmun’s voice had turned slow, sad, serious all at once. “You could try to buy all sorts, but I have a feeling most folk here would only say they don’t need your money.”

“Because I won a fucking duel?”

“Because of how you won.”

“Fucking what about it?” Simra groaned. “I didn’t break Pavol’s rule, did I? I just – what? – circumvented it. He said shit-all about enchantments.”

“I won’t argue it with you. I wouldn’t know how. But I suppose there are those who’d say you clevered your way to winning in what should’ve rightly been a trial of arms.”

“Like I said, honour can eat ash in a fucking urn. Honour can piss off out to sea. I’m still alive, which is more than that chinless bastard can say. Any welty fucking prick who says otherwise can keep their fucking honour and see where it gets them.”

Pirmun made a muddled face up at Simra. An admiring smile hung at the corners of his mouth, but his brow was frowning, his eyes were concerned. “You can go on saying that, but do you know what else they’ll keep to themselves if you do? Their bread, their ale, and their vinegar.”

“Fuck…”

 

Simra wondered why Pirmun treated him any different. Perhaps, under all his shy-bruised sincerity and patience, it was still fear that earnt him Pirmun’s kindness? A corner to sleep in, these last few nights, under the Riftman’s roof. The occasional meal in return for help cooking. Same as when they’d first spoken — perhaps it was all still fear. He had reason by now, after all. Or perhaps the answer was all the simpler: Pirmun’s heart was a kind one, long-starved of anyone to be kind to. Simple, maybe, but it did nothing to ease Simra’s mind or calm his nerves. It helped him feel beholden. Like he owed Pirmun something he didn’t know that he could pay back.

_The stain is faint but stubborn. A faded-tea red-brown thing, in soaks and spatters on the front of my newest finest tunic. Anyone other than a fool might’ve taken it off to fight in. (That might’ve won me some popular approval too — Nordic as anything, stripping to the waist to get scrappy.) Or else I could’ve put on my aketon. Red as it is, the blood would’ve barely shown. Perhaps I ought to dye the tunic too, when I can… A shame though, to obscure the embroidery like that. Then again, there’s a weird sort of pleasure in the prospect of making it secret: there to the touch, but unseen by the eye._

_Any case, what’s ever been gained except through the sacrifice of something else? By accident or design; trade, loss, or gambit. Like with calling and wielding fire, something will always be eaten._

_So — I bloodied my tunic, bruised my face. But every way otherwise, I won back what’s mine. My coin, my sword and spearhead, the wand that won me the duel. My bags and their contents, and the book I’m writing in now. Mine again. And I tell myself that’s what matters. But when I try and think out the joy of regaining things, I find it’s a hollow thing. Quick enough it shakes down to nothing. Like I’ve gained nothing. Learnt nothing. Only scratched back most of what my own fooling lost me._

_And I suppose I’ve lost other things besides. In all of Vernimwood, Pirmun’s the only one who’ll treat with me now. And maybe some day the others’ll forget. Or maybe some doubtful day I’ll outlive the ones who watched me kill Pavol, and return to find every face in this pig-pen rabbit-warren cabbage-patch town fresh and strange to me as I am to them. Or might be I’ll just not come back._

_But for now I deal with Pirmun._

 

North out of Vernimwood, the way became a road. No paving to it. Just smooth uncobbled dirt. Come rain it would turn to a river of mud, flowing whicheverway had even the slightest slope. But on that high-skied day, shot through with buzzards calling out faraway-thin in the distant blue, it was nothing but hardpacked dirt, trod and trodden to the point where the local plants had long ago learnt better than to grow it over. So, not a track anymore — a road.

Crookback and meandering, it wandered through the Eastmarch — flowed according to ease, like a river does, rather than carving a path. Between low rises and hillocks, banks of scanty brush that showed heathery purple, wind-bleached wan-green. Between crags and rising spittles of steam where the ground had given way to the same strange heat that seethed under the saltlflats, off a while to the west. All the while, the east was made of mountains: the Velothi range, marking the edge of Skyrim. Their feet were thick-pelted with pine trees, and heavy for Simra with memories of troll-hunting, but their crag-tops jagged bare and black against the sky.

In fangs and fingers, old stonework brooded over the landscape. Standing stones, worn by time, and arches bent or broken with age. One stood high above a sunken marl of salt, stone, and standing water. It was a half-fallen arch, now a reach of carven stone, sparring out from the ground like a half-buried rib.

Simra narrowed his eyes and meshed his lashes against the Summer sunshine. Stopping his pace and squinting overland towards the loom of its silhouette, he reached to his sash and unhooked his waterskin. He took a swig of warm and leather-tasting water. When he spoke – half to himself and half to the broken arch – the words still came dry from his throat.

“I remember you…”

That morning he’d traded with Pirmun by way of saying goodbye. Besides a dense round cob of buckwheat bread, and a stem-tied bunch of purple carrots, all the weight of his feed-bag was meat. A clothbound scrag of preserved venison and a fat-marbled strip of thick cured pork-belly. All this heat, and most of what he had to eat was heavy-salted thirst-fostering stuff. It was either funny, or cruel to the point of comedy, and through the mussy haze of his parched mouth and dry throat, he couldn’t decide which. At least for what it was, and at least for what it was worth, he’d provisioned himself cheap enough to end up wondering why. Simra had given Pirmun the letter, but that meant next to nothing when his grandmother couldn’t write, and he himself couldn’t read. Was Pirmun always so soft in the barter, Simra wondered, or just soft on him?

“I remember you,” Simra repeated, as he struck up his pace again.

Red webs of creeproot covered the roadside. Perched on a gnarl-trunked tree, a crow followed Simra’s going with a sidelong stare. Ahead, the road cut through the saltflats, or else the flats cut into the road. And in the sun, the pools and crystal-rimed rocks shone less like salt and more like silver. By sunset, Simra was down and walking amongst them. Everything that had glittered before by now had turned to gold.


	72. Chapter 72

_Eastmarch slides northward. Off and away from the sighing barrens of the saltflats, brown gives way to green, and hills rise once more._

_Ridges, thick copses of pine and larch and linden, slopes thick with fir-needles and whatever blossoms fell at the end of Spring. Valleys that whisper with the voices of creeks over moss-soft rocks. Coves and dips and inlets that’re hard to see til you’re in them and trying to figure out the easiest way to clamber out, except by going back the way you came._

_It’s country in starkest contrast to the Rift. The horizon disappears for days at a time as you pick through the land’s ragged highs and lows. It’s wilderness, struck through by the road I follow, and broken occasional with hidden homesteads, farm-plots, hamlets._

_And it turns even the following of a road into a kind of hiking. Even the gentlest pace is gruelling. I’m tired. Next rise of smoke I see, I ought to draw in close and check, and ask to make sure this is the way to Windhelm. But I don’t think I could stomach the company. Questions and the utterless asking of eyes on me. Strangers. I’ve not got the strength for that in me right now._

 

Beyond the heavy weald of hills and woods, the road poured into a wider valley. It snaked into the broad distance, meandering across the lowlands towards a far-off gleaming ribbon of water. That was the White River and the way towards it was all downhill. Simra couldn’t quite bring himself to be thankful.

He was nearly home. Maybe that was part of the problem. More likely that was a grim and wishful kind of thinking as he searched for somewhere else he could pin the blame. But he’d felt this way before and every time it came and hollowed him out, it felt like this time it’d never end.

“Ought to know better than to look for reasons, Sim. It’s just you. Always has been. Just the way you are.”

There was no comfort in knowing the truth. Only the churly shadow-satisfaction that came with saying ‘I told you so.’

Simra walked. He reckoned walking was about all he was good for today. And sometimes even that felt like asking too much. Footsore and with the ache of a thousand thousand impacts, blunt-struck step by step in his knees and hips, ankles and lower back, he walked.

Some dim detached part of him knew that he was filthy. He’d not bathed or spelled himself clean in days. He travelled and slept in the self-same clothes, creased with dirt and ripe with the lingering scent of sweat. It shamed him, but he didn’t have the strength to change a thing. Putting one foot in front of the other was enough, or else it had already become too much.

On a slope that overlooked a little clenched fist of a village, nestled into another steep pine-impenetrable crag of wood and rocky ground, Simra looked out across a plundered band of felled trees. Amputated things, hacked brief and sad by foresters’ axes, the tree-stumps put a lump in his throat and an ache in his eyes. Stupid. Getting choked up by the taking of timber. When had he ever had any love for the wilderness?

“You never have. It’s just you.” There was no point pinning his sadness on something beyond him. “It’s just you.”

The road went alongside the rough swathe of stumps. A sob threatened up into his throat. He bit it back, swallowing it, swearing. “Fuck that… Fuck that…” He collapsed, hunched down onto a tree-stump. It was only when he stopped walking that he noticed how tired of it he was. The burn in his calves and the gnawing soreness that had taken up in the soles of his feet. They both murmured a warning that made getting up and starting off again feel like more than he could manage — a bigger and better task than he deserved.

“Shit…” he breathed. “Ought to be ashamed…” And he was. It loomed over him, like the clammy cold thrown out by a shadow on an otherwise sun-bright day. “Fucking disgusting…”

Laziness, his father used to tell him, in the time they worked the docks together. He’d told Simra til he took it to heart, and learnt to tell himself the same. Until he could hear him, even alone:

“You act like you are weighed down, but by what? You have not begun to work, so what right do you have to be tired? You are not hurt, so what right do you have to go round as if you are wounded? You are lying to me. Worse, you lie to yourself. Wake up, Simra. Be strong enough to tell yourself the truth.”

But he wasn’t strong. If he was, he’d never get so spineless, so lazy, so stupid. Limp and useless, burnt out to worse than nothing. But when his father talked to him like that, it made him angry enough to get up, go out, work and do what needed done. Not because he was strong, or because his father had inspired him, or because he was anything other than broken down and boneless. But because of how much he wanted his father to think he’d been wrong.

Simra was alone. Sambidal wasn’t here to spite with a second wind, watching with the sharp amber eyes he’d passed on to his son. “Get the fuck up,” Simra growled to himself. But it didn’t make him burn like his father’s words did, when he told Simra he was imagining it — that whatever he felt was shadows and lies. Easy to say, when he didn’t have to feel it. The iron-cold weight in his chest. The dull grey fog that filled his skull.

When had he last eaten? Hard to recall when he’d started forgetting. Hunger dawned on him, but never seemed pressing or important. Eating never seemed like it would help. Not if all he had to eat were the provisions he carried. He wanted something else, but couldn’t begin to think what.

“Fuck it…” How long had he sat there now? The sun had moved. He was wasting time. The day was turning to waste around him. “Fuck it…”

In a lurching stumble, Simra rose and carried on. A foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the next. Like a kind of controlled falling. All he had to do was catch himself every time. That was all.

At night he was too tired to sleep. Or else he was too uncomfortable. Or else the dark around him was too loud. It bothered him and made him afraid, the way it whispered and hooted, called and then fell silent.

He sat up with his back to a pile of stones by the roadside – a grave maybe, or a league-marker – and watched the gloomy hover of his magelight as it sent a whimpering glow out into the night. Dim, but dim was the best he could manage.

When dawn broke over the distant mountains, the light snuffed out. Keeping it up had been like holding his breath. When he started to walk again, Simra was already exhausted.

With his mother it was different. Sambidal made his demands of him, but Ishar had her own. His was a slap in the face while hers were creeping things that slipped beneath Simra’s skin. Once, he’d thought maybe he could be more himself with her. He’d thought she might believe him, and know how to help, like she knew what she knew about illness and healing, curses and their unravelling.

But when he’d found the strength to say through tears that wouldn’t quite come, “What’s wrong with me? I dunno what’s wrong with me!” All she did was pull him close as he flinched and cringed away from her arms, and tell him in a cooing whisper:

“Nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing. You’ve grown healthy and strong. You have food and work and books to read. And you’re loved, Lonya. So much. Nothing’s wrong. So what’s there to be sad over, hm? Nothing. It makes me sad to see you so unhappy. It hurts. You don’t want to hurt your poor Ammu, do you?”

It felt like she’d reached a hand inside him, gloved in guilt, and twisted something. She let him know that he had to pretend for her as well.

That night he wrote in his journal again. A ragged list of questions in lazy shaky handwriting that wasted the parchment around them by not saving it for something better.

 

_Is this what I’m going back to?_   
_What words will my mother have for me?_   
_What words will my father withhold?_   
_Wasn’t that always their way?_   
_What she said and what he didn’t say?_   
_Is it my family I’m coming back to?_   
_Or is it the city itself?_   
_Both have a call, so which am I answering?_

 

How could he dream if he didn’t sleep? But he must have, some time, must have, for the dreams that found him.

Push through the curtain that covers the doorway. Step over the guest-glyph, half-expecting it to recoil at his presence — tell him this home wasn’t his anymore. Through the little antechamber where his mother set up shop by day. Then into the inner chamber. The family’s room, with its hearth, the laundry hung up to dry. Empty except for lived-in mess like his mother would never allow. Empty except for Soraya. She sits cross-legged by the hearth, stoked and banked up high and wasteful-hot. Heat or no, she’s wearing her almost-wedding-gift. Belled elbow-length sleeves, fine fur collar — a jacket of good leather, made special for her, with a scrib-silk lining, embroidered with willow anther flowers. She looks up from a heaped bowl of porridge and with a wide wide grin she says:

“They’re gone. They’re gone, Sim! Them and all the others… Wait. Why’re you not pleased? Nah. Fuck no, don’t you start. Don’t you dare start tearing up! I did this for you! Did it all for you!”

Simra woke up brim-bursting with feelings to the point of pain. Not one of the emotions had a name he knew. They were a storm inside him, all mess and muddle, stitched together like badly made patchwork. But then the grey closed in. The storm subsided, dwindling to dull nothing once more, murky and grey as tarnished pewter and just as cold.


	73. Chapter 73

“Just things,” said Simra to himself. “That’s all. Just things.”

The words were meant to steady him – steel his nerves cold again – but there was no magic in them, and no real confidence. Not even any true want. They were just words, and his breath hitched as he spoke them, trembled again as he breathed back in. Time enough had passed that the men had turned to corpses. Their flesh had started cooling and by now was halfway to meat. But Simra was all a-jangle still with something close to elation.

“Just deserts,” he said. The words poured out and turned over and over. They tumbled and twisted like pieces of a puzzle some part of his mind was fixed on solving. “Just things, right? Like, things that’re just. Justice? Justice. — Fuck. Think! Get fucking thinking. Things!”

One had crawled himself up the bank before it stopped moving. Grovelling all that way had smeared the corpse into a black-muddied mess that, all told, Simra reckoned was now a twofold mercy.

“Not gotta drag you all that way. That’s one. Two..?” He glanced at the mud-hid corpse. Past the mud at the tangled wrongness of its limbs, like a spider curled up in pain. Under all that dirt there was less to see. No mangled or burnt flesh. Just the flash of grey-green quilted cloth. “…That’s two,” he muttered, grim, and fell silent.

The other would need carrying.

Simra scudded on his bootheels down the streambank and splashed once more ankle-deep into the water. In panting urges, straining heaves of back and arms, hips and knees, Simra hauled the other dead man up the muddy slope.

In silence and behind sealed lips, he counted his blessings. This man, like the other, was a half-starved kind of skinny, and no great ordeal to drag a few yards. The side of the stream was shallow at first, barely a slope at all. And these two men were dead because of what he’d done to stay alive. Which meant he was still alive. Still alive. Still living.

That was a sweet taste on his tongue, beyond the waning battle-blood’s tang of bile and urge to vomit. That was a strange raw song in his muscles as they still refused to relax. That was safe knowledge, sudden clarity, piercing through the grey.

“You’re alright,” he said to himself. “You did good.”

 

_Write it down. Write or you won’t remember. — A lie, that. I will. I do. The details come with time – always – more clear in recollection than in the moment’s blur and mire. — So why write? To get the memories out of me, pressed like flowers between pages, maybe. Like if I don’t have to remember then maybe I won’t and they won’t always be up there because instead they’ll be here, laid down in ink. Or not. Or else to get them straight. Or else, write it down, Simra, because if you get done all the doing but don’t reflect, then how in fuck’re you ever meant to learn from it?_

_(And already this page is a mess… Start again. Begin at the beginning.)_

_Mist and muggy morning, and a stream runs musical across the way ahead. No springtime snowmelt or cool weather rain to swell its banks, so it’s low and slow and shallow. A calf-deep trickle at best, though it must once have been something bigger for how it runs through the cloven carve of this smallish gorge. The road slithers down trenchwards and cuts across the stream at a ford of worn-flat stones and dam-trapped flotsam. And here the path chokes. A narrow alley cut through all this nature._

_Two men block the way. Or rather, two men are in the way, ready to block when blocking’s needed._

_One sits on the crown of a carved stone head, smooth and mossed with age and sunk to the nostrils in rivermud. In a short stubby pipe he smokes something acrid and resinous I can smell from the stream’s far side. A yellow-fingered throat-stinger of a scent. A straw-coloured tangle of beard clings to his chin and cheeks, but under it his face is gaunt. The quilted aketon he wears is grey-green, leathered at the shoulders, and looks cut for a bigger man — the man he might once have been, before starvation shrunk him. A tall teardrop shield is propped next to him. A spear leans against his shoulder. A hatchet is hooked through his belt._

_The other man’s hardly a man at all. Fuzz on his chin and upper lip. Mouse-brown hair braided behind his ears. At the front and back of his body, he wears the familiar fall of overlapping iron splints. Reckon that marks him an Eastmarch warrior of more than modest means. That and the stirrup-muzzled crossbow I can see slung across his back._

_Feet in the stream and hands at his bloused Eastmarcher’s breeches, he stands poised to piss into the water._

_In silhouette against an off-white sky, up and across the gully from them, I’m halted. And I blink and squint at him. And he blinks at me and his mouth hangs open, mute before it can manage words._

_“Goran..? Goran, we’ve got one.”_

_The one with the pipe looks up. “Ware now, stranger. Nothing hasty now, nothing hasty.” He makes to rise. “We’re all friends here, hey, but order of the carl in Heransvale is that this ford’s a toll-ford and— HEY. I said—!”_

_His hands went casual to his weapons as he spoke. Arm through the straps of his shield and fingers round the haft of his spear. I couldn’t have spoken to them. I know the shakedown with men like this. And no words would come. Dry mouth and grit-bared teeth, no words would come. Just fear for tinder and kindling, and a flame of panicked rage._

_I duck to one knee. Snatch the wand from my boot and strike before they do. I come up amidst shouts and the start of motion. I take aim and join the runes on the wand’s grip as the younger man fumbles the crossbow off his back and shunts its cocking-stirrup to the ground, and the other man hefts his shield, brings level the point of his spear._

_The enchantment in the wand jolts through me, jerks through my wrist. First time, my aim is poor. The bolt snarls out and mangles the stone beside him with a grating short-lived creech._

_“Elven filth!” Goran howls as he comes, shield out and charging up the slope towards me. “Stop your witching and face me like a man, vermin!”_

_But I look back on him now as I write – his snarling face and the sudden twitch of hate in his eyes – and see his uphill charge for what it was. Stupid. Blind with terror of what he’s never tried to understand. Easy to punish. So I punished him._

_My second shot drills into his right shoulder as he draws back his spear for an overhand thrust, bringing it out behind his shield. Cloth and flesh and leather twist in on themselves. He screams again but this time wordless as the joint of his arm seizes and tangles. The thrust follows through, but weak now from pain. He staggers up the rise after it. I’ve jerked aside from the speartip. He’s wrong-footed, spit slathering his beard like the foamed muzzle of a beast. His face contorts like the wand’s already struck and mangled it. I’m at his blindside and he can’t turn face in time._

_The wand shudders once more. This time it’s his torso that caves in. The flank of his chest. Cloth through flesh, through ribs and lungs. He tries for one more lunge at me, supporting himself on the downpoint of his shield. The spear thrashes out. Its shaft strikes a slanting line of pain across my right arm. Just a bruise. I throw my left hand forward. Through the pain, I bark a calling. A mess of oily flame and hot air chases him back. It licks at his shield and catches. He lets go a grinding wail as he fumbles at the shield-straps, trying to drop the smoking and coal-glowing thing. I don’t give him time. Another calling scorches out. This time the flame takes to his hair, his clothes, his skin. He goes down, squealing in the mud, and slides down the slope in a tangle of struggling limbs._

_No time to watch and no need to see. On the far bank, the younger man’s crossbow is readied and aimed. The screaming doesn’t stop, but a pointed thrum cuts through it. An iron-tipped quarrel that misses me by hasty-fired inches as I flinch myself small and throw up my arms over my head. From the crouch I’ve fallen into, I aim the wand again. Join the runes. No fourth shot ever comes._

_Snarl and curse. Stab the wand back into my boot. Screaming, still screaming, from the smoking foundering thing at the bottom of the gully. Neither of us has the luxury of range anymore. No time to reload the crossbow, and no more charge in the wand. We both draw steel._

_“Like a man?” I howl, or think I howl, as if to claim some corner of all this cacophony for my own. “You want me to fight like a man? Come on then! Come on you juldehk fuck, I’ll fucking open you!”_

_Did I make the same mistake as Goran, I wonder, careening down the slope and across the ford? Did I give up the high-ground? Or is that Terez in the back of my head, picking apart my tactics and technique? To you, Terez, I ask: out of me and the Nord boy on the stream’s far bank, which of us is dead?_

 

Simra closed his eyes, huddled his lower face into the patchwork cloth of his scarf, and remembered to breathe through his mouth. If he sniffed in the burning reek that was woven through the air, he’d never get the taste off the back of his tongue. The stench and smoke of two hasty-made grave-pyres, burning on the bankside.

No doubt if the tables were turned, the Nords would’ve carried him off and left him somewhere for the foxes and crows. The thought tensed his neck and put a grimace on Simra’s face. He didn’t know the particulars of what rites the Nords gave their dead, nor even the ones his own people afforded to theirs. But wasn’t burning better than nothing?

“One more way to be better than them,” Simra muttered under his breath. In that one way, he’d done better by them than they would’ve by him. And that was enough, when all the rest was only fair.

He’d picked over the bodies for all he could, and piled up the takings besides him, away from the spitting flames of the pyres. Killed and robbed the two of them, as they would’ve done for him. Soraya had a phrase for that.

“Poet’s justice…” Simra crooked a smile at the words. But his eyes were pink and stinging with water. “Just the smoke… And all the rest’s just a matter of things…”

The stream still chuckled over the scene. Simra, where he sat on the half-buried stone head, blowing dry the ink on the pages of his journal with short-rationed breaths. The piled bodies and dry pine-needles across the stream, burning slow, palled bitter with smoke. The mess of nameless red and grey and pink that had slopped into the ford’s shallow waters and caught between its stones, slow to rinse away.

And through closed eyes, Simra saw it again. Like remembered faces and half-ghosted things float in the dark of a pitch-black room, as sight looks inward, unable to see out.

The Nord boy with the braided hair, his face of a sudden all stiff and pale as he stood with lowered stance and sword in hand. A shortish Nordic blade, tapering all up its length. Simple guard and grip, wide down-pointed crescent for a pommel. A thrusting sword, Simra noted, even before the boy made ready to thrust with it.

It would’ve skewered Simra on the force of his own charge. Instead, on some dim vestige of drummed-in technique, Simra skidded his heels to slow himself. Slipped his own blade low and left from where he’d held it high and right. It was a clumsy point-down hang of a block, but enough to swipe the boy’s point away. Simra’s blade was between the other sword and his body. That was what mattered.

When they crashed together in a barge of shoulders – too close now for swords to be any use til they separated – that was what mattered. When Simra tangled past the boy, turned on a twisting left foot, then brought his blade hacking down in a wrenching two-handed overhead arc that made his shoulder scream, that was what mattered. His sword-blade bit, grating past a desperate one-handed parry. It took the boy at the hairline. Cracked more than cut through the bone. No time to pull back or follow through for another cut, Simra brought up his right knee. It caught the boy hard in the jaw. Jolted him back. Then Simra fell on him with the jutting yellow-bone shape of his sword’s pommel. Strike and strike til there was more blood to the boy’s head than skin or scalp, and part of what his skull contained was there amongst the water and rocks.

That was what mattered. And that’s what he’d tell Terez, or anyone else who’d ask.

Through the grey, the weird pride he took in it all was too welcome to worry him. This was the first joy he’d felt in days. The only pleasure that had broken through. The bliss of being alive and having earnt it. The bliss, for once, of being good at something.


	74. Chapter 74

_The boy’s short Nordic sword, crescent-pommelled, tapered for the thrust. Shoddy mass-made iron, if I’ve any eye for these things. The balance feels all wrong, and the blade’s taken rust close to its base. A simple cord-wrapped grip, a brief bar of a guard, no room for two hands below the hilt. But it comes with scabbard and swordbelt. Wonder if there’s any chance I can rework the latter to hang my own Riftfolk rider’s sword..?_

_The boy’s crossbow. A short and lightish fowling piece, I reckon, with little range and scant little power to it. Brief steel arms and braided string. Stock carved into a pretty curl though, like the prow of a longship. Eight stocky flightless quarrels in a draw-string belt-bag to go with it._

_The other man – Goran’s – war-spear. Ashwood shaft, a little shorter than I am tall, and a narrow wicked wrought-iron bodkin for a point, more like a sized-up arrowhead than a spear-tip. That and his short hardy work-hatchet, which I’ve taken not so much for the sake of selling as for the sheer use of it — cutting kindling with a sword is miserable work._

_These things I can carry easy enough. Sword and crossbow at my back, hatchet tucked into my sash. The spear, I can hold in my hand, and with the extra weight, it’s good to have something I can lean on. The other takings sit fine in my bags._

_A flint and fire-steel set in a carved horn box. A clay bottle of strong acrid grain-spirit, wrapped round with a coarse bastcloth cosy to keep it from breaking. A waxed leather pouch with a thumbnail’s-worth left of whatever yellow-smelling resin that Goran was smoking. A bastcloth package of three salt-packed smoked fish, red and oily and firm-fleshed. Four hard-baked and dry millet grain-biscuits. The iron splints, pried off the boy’s armour. A smooth bone ring, carved round with runes that just read ‘promise.’ Two pairs of leather turnshoes, hung by their bootstraps from my satchel. And one of the glaucous-blue Stormcloak scarf-shawls that both men were wearing — the one not ruined by blood. (So were they deserters or some kind of hearth-guard left behind? The difference, I suppose, is minimal, and no concern to me.)_

_That and some eleven-odd copper pennies and one more of black Eastmarch iron._

_To say I got away with nothing but plunder would be a lie, mind. I have a seething red bruise coming up on the edge of my right upper arm where Goran whipped me with his spear. It sets to hurting every time the muscle so much as twitches. The bruise coming up on my knee isn’t much better. I have scab-scraped knuckles on my right hand, and beyond that my joints and every ounce of flesh on me feel like they’ve taken a beating and a stretching well beyond comfort._

_I have a crawling creep-growing doubt in the back of my mind that I would have come away with much worse if not for the wand I chanced on. I tell myself I’m better than that, even without, but not for one moment would I rather’ve forgone it. One fighter against two, I tell myself: I’d’ve been a fool not to tip the odds any way I could._

_Beyond that small voice, in my head I feel clear and level. Better than I did by far. I’ve cleaned myself, eaten spit-fired smoked riverfish for dinner. And for the last day or so, I’ve walked between fields of grain and greens, smallholdings with slim borders of wilderness and silvery stream between them._

_I had the courage to stop into a farmhouse to trade for food. A dozen eggs, a loaf of brown-black treacle-sweet country bread, and there and then a bowl of cabbage and bacon soup and a mug of dark rye kvas, in return for one of the pairs of turnshoes. A welcome change from days of salted meat and oat porridge. And by how glad the whey-faced farmer’s wife was to see both pairs hanging from my satchel-strap, I wondered how far-ranging the two men had been in collecting their ‘tolls’…_

 

And then there were no more fields. No more farms. A great flattish swathe of country, banded by water to the north and rising wooded hills to the south. And all across it there was only turned mud, black dirt, the occasional pale green attempt by weeds and wildflowers to reclaim the land that had been Ulfric Stormcloak’s muster-camp.

With the tents of the fyrd and its followers gone, Simra saw what they’d hidden before. The blackened skeleton of a cottage, reduced to its dark stone foundations. Inside, the cinder-scorched dome of what might have been a bread-oven claimed and turned to purpose as a forge, then abandoned. The cast-off frame of a plough, forgotten. A granary that was empty except for a teeming nest of wasps that had taken up inside it. In moving out and on to the Rift, the fyrd had gutted the land behind them.

But beyond all that, Windhelm loomed large and ancient and ageless as ever. Black walls of stone across a high-flowing white tide of river. Walls built with moss-bearded human faces, drooling trickles of gutter-water into the river. Then the peaked eaves of uptown’s halls and manses, looking in silhouette like ink-dark mountains drawn on a map. The balustrades and aqueduct struts that moored the city to the mountains – grey now and snowless-bald – and then the high distance of the Stone Quarter.

The Blackstone Bridge reached across the water, built with watchtowers and layer upon layer of smaller gates that banded towards the biggest and oldest. Huge things, Simra remembered, of carved stone heads and gaping mouths, heavy oak and ancient black iron. He’d never seen them closed. Wondered if anyone even knew how to close them anymore, they’d grown so old and ungainly. So, Windhelm’s mouth yawned always open: a hungry maw gaping inward and onto the Kingsway.

Close to the first set of gates, the barren landscape bustled into motion. Mules and oxen heaved carts onto the arched bridge-back, moving to enter the city. Where the bridge moored onto the river’s south bank, small gaggles of markets and stall-holders cropped the land into pens for goats, sheep, and cattle. Simra even saw a trio of red-cheeked round-faced Wintrings in cape-collared tunics, selling and butchering from their herd of reindeer, roped together by the antlers and necks.

All around, the babble of haggle and barter filled the air, alongside the scents of cooking. Sizzling greenwood skewers of meat roasted over peat and hot stones. Cauldrons of stew were pitched steaming above cookfires, feeding the travellers and traders for a copper a share.

Simra had hard-boiled three eggs for breakfast, and though he’d peeled and eaten them as he walked through the morning, the sights and sounds were almost enough to get him hungry again. But the wary looks the sellers gave him quashed down any urge to treat with them. Baggage, slung and belted weapons, spear in hand, Stormcloak blue scarf knotted into his sash — he looked like a soldier, and something in that raised their hackles. No matter, Simra realised. Other things, it’d make easier.

He unwound the patchwork scarf from round his neck and switched it for the dead Nord’s grey-blue shawl. On his skin the change was sudden: the many fabrics and textures of the patchwork, traded for rough-spun wool. Climbing up a flight of stairs at the bridge’s side, Simra pushed into the crowd of carts, riders and foot-traffic and made his way across.

Halfway along, the bridge bulged out to form a kind of walled and gated island. Set into the walls of it, murder-holes for archers peered in on the wide courtyard like a score of black eyes. Between them were tariff offices, guard-stations, small waiting-warehouses. Somewhere, Simra heard the chest-deep baying of a dog. Time to go. He angled hard toward one of the outer walls and carried on through the next gate, hurrying now, away from the noise and towards the gatehouse of the city itself.

“Elf?”

Before the open gates of Windhelm, Simra buried the urge to twist round, searching the crowd for anyone else that word might apply to. Instead he looked towards the speaker – a watchman, tall-helmed, dressed in a blue-grey aketon over a short coat of mail – and found he was looking back. He stood in formation with four other guards, all similarly equipped, all dealing with the folk coming into the city. Most got through with barely a question asked. Most were human.

Simra stepped to, well into the reach of the watchman’s heavy-bladed bardiche, and fixed the Nord who’d spoken to him with a quizzing look.

“Yes, brother?”

If the guard was taken aback at the familiarity, he didn’t show it. “Tell me, what’s your business in Windhelm?” Then again, if he was at all bought over by it, he showed no sign of that either.

Simra frowned, angled his head, like the question hardly needed asking. A head or so taller than Simra, he had to look up to hold the guard’s eye. “The king’s business.” He thought about smiling. Decided it’d be better to just seem frustrated. Held up. Not a hard act, that. “I’d’ve hoped there’s been enough messengers come through this gate that you know what we look like by now…”

“None of them have looked like you.”

“And what in all weathers is that meant to mean, hey?” Simra played off the prickle of anger he felt as something quieter, more withering. “I was born in Skyrim, brother. I know where my loyalties lie, I know where my duty takes me, and both’re past these gates. So…if you’d waive the usual pleasantries you give my kind and step aside?” Force in the last two words.

“You’re a messenger…” the guard said, doubtful. “Wouldn’t you be quicker coming by horse?”

Simra snorted through his nose. “I know quicker ways to travel than on horseback.” A smug look crept across his face as something in the guard’s changed.

“I’d ask to see your papers, but—”

“—But I’ve been in the Rift these past eight months,” Simra said, hard and clipped, like he was on the brink of pulling rank. In truth it was almost panic that heightened his voice. “There weren’t any storm-blasted papers when I left. Now, let – me – thro—”

“Alright! Right you are, right you are, frola…”

That was good. That was very good. Cowing a guard into calling him that, all but bowing and scraping as he brought in the bardiche close to his body and let Simra past. The relief was sweet as honey.

“Thank you, brother,” Simra said, curt and cold, as he hurried on down the thronging Kingsway, north towards the Stone Quarter and Palace of Kings.

Well after he was out of sight, almost ready to turn east and off down the slopes that led to the Quarter, he thought he heard a shout, following him.

“Run on, little elf! Quick to heel!”

It caught Simra unsurprised. He’d got his way, and made the guard look a dolt doing it. Of course the man would pose and posture to win back what bluster he could in front of his real brothers in the watch. Papers and all, the city had changed some, but sure as sunrise it was not for the better.


	75. Chapter 75

The guest’s glyph hissed like a half-feral cat, wary when faced with a stranger. It had been daubed onto the threshold of his home for as long as Simra could remember. Set into the floor of the little entrance-chamber where his mother laid down her mats, and sold ointments, tinctures, blessings and advice. Now the magic it was made from barely remembered him.

A hang of iron chimes tolled dull, somewhere off down the row. In the strange secondhand wind that gusted through the Quarter sometimes, the wood and rope of the Rigs gave a low long-suffering groan. Hesitant in the curtained doorway, Simra watched the glyph. Its thick white paint bubbled. A thin rise of steam trailed up from one corner. In all the years he’d known the glyph was there, he’d never found out what it would do to an unwelcome guest…

“Won’t fucking have to…” Simra muttered to himself. “Crowshit. This is my home. I fucking live here…”

He stepped across it. Nothing happened. A long nothing, anxious and triumphant. Just Simra’s boots scuffing dust onto the paint as he bent down to struggle them off his feet.

Smooth beads of wood and shell rattled against each other, ribbing against his fingers as Simra parted the second curtain. Beyond it, the main chamber was drenched in darkness. He cupped his hands and whispered a magelight into them. Small and shy. A thing of soft cold light that threw its rust-red glow across the cave-rough walls. Across the sail-cloth curtain that covered off the warren’s rearmost taper and its right-hand side. The pit and blackened chimneysides of the hearth, surrounded by snow-drifts of cinders, dunes of ash. The low-slung table they all used to eat around — all four of them.

“Ammu? Babu?” His voice came thin and frail. “Ma..?”

No answer came from the dark. No scent of cooking except the old linger of past meals in the smoke-black stains of the chimney and the way aromas clung to the room’s curtains. Unlit stubs of candle crowded Ishar’s hearthside shrine. Along the wall, the shelves of spices, reagents, simples and the hanging bunches of dried herbs were all there, just as Simra remembered them. But the warren felt more empty than ever he’d known it to be.

For now at least he was alone. He was almost too much of a coward to wait out the silence — to sit, lighting the dark. Almost. He brought out peat from the basket beside the hearth. Broke it up and built it into a fire. With sparks that shimmered from his outstretched palm, Simra lit the hearth.

As he waited by the fire, the mood around him changed and unchanged itself. Like waves, it welled up and fell back, swelled and retreated. Simra made a pot of pine-smoked tea in his own kettle, over his mother’s hearth. He was returned and welcome, warm and safe. Simra took one of his mother’s pots and set it simmering to cook barley and boil chicken’s eggs. And he was a stranger, stealing the use of everything he touched. Simra shrugged off his bags, but couldn’t bring himself to stow them behind the back curtain where he used to sleep.

He peeled the boiled eggs one by one and tossed their shells into the flames. He took a pinch of yellow-spice from the shelves and added it to the simmering grain.

An hour or more had passed before he heard footsteps on the threshold. A scuffle of cloth-wrapped feet on stone, then bare flesh as they came unbound. It was a familiar sound, come at an old familiar time. Simra’s heart thrashed like a drowning man in his chest. The second curtain rattled again and Simra’s father came in from the evening.

“Ishar..?” he called out, talking in Dunmeris. “You’re home already? I hadn’t expected—…”

“Da?” Simra’s voice trimmed high and thin. All over again, it was hard not to feel like a child, and speaking Dunmeris his words came out childish-simple. “It’s – um – it’s not her. It’s me.”

“Simra..?” Sambidal’s whole frame drooped. He took a half-step forward. Lit by magelight and fireglow, his face said too much of the skull underneath, drawn tight, thin-skinned. “You…” he fumbled for words in Tamnordic, then let go a stream of words in Dunmeris Simra couldn’t catch. They could as easy have been curses as greetings. “Simra, I—!”

Sambidal’s voice choked off. Simra’s eyes ached. The root of his tongue felt thick in his throat. His father’s silences, and the things he didn’t have the words or the will to say, had always spoken volumes, but this was a hung uncertain quiet. There was nothing in Sambidal’s face to read — just the twitch and play of shadows in his hollow cheeks, firelight on his brow and bones. It lasted a moment, then broke. Barefoot and mask-faced, Sambidal hurried over to the hearthside and creaked to his knees next to Simra.

“Yuh assurni pal-khora pal-lassu,” Sambidal murmured the words like a prayer of thanks, “bel-ha mal-annour…Yuh assurni…” he repeated. ‘Be blessed under sun and sky, my son…Be blessed...’ He raised one whip-lean arm. The hand wavered a moment, reaching up to Simra’s shoulder, but stopped before it could touch him. It came with a slap back down onto Sambidal’s knee. “Your hair has grown so long…” he said, voice weak as he switched back into Tamnordic.

“It does that, hair.” Simra said without smiling. He was guarded, he realised. Trying not to be drawn in by his father’s tried and tired face — his mothertongue blessings. He was waiting for what he deserved. Whatever that was, it wasn’t this: these prayers and shining eyes.

“I am not dreaming this. I have before, but…” Sambidal shook his head and turned his gaze down, into his lap. “If this was a dream or if you were a ghost, you would look like you did. The same. But you do not.” Again, Simra saw his father’s fingers twitch, holding back an urge to touch.

“I’m just back is all,” said Simra. His voice softened. Cracked. He gave in. “Sorry. Uhm. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Didn’t tell you anything. Not where I was going. When I’d be back. But I’m back now…if…that’s alright? I really—…I really hope that’s alright…”

Sambidal drew in a long breath, like he was readying himself to speak. Instead he nodded, dipping his head heavy on his neck. His eyes closed for a moment. The lids were dark, purple-grey and cornered with crowsfoot lines. Sambidal let go a sigh, and nodded.

“I made dinner,” said Simra. “Or started to. Is that alright? It’s mostly my own things. I mean…I hoped we could—…” He gestured helpless at the low table behind them.

“We will try, I think.” Sambidal gave a tired smile. “We will have to.”

Simra poured them each a cup of tea. It sat red-brown in bone-coloured fired clay cups, two full and rising with smoke-scented steam, one still empty.

“Where did you go?” Sambidal asked, hesitant. “To war?” He nodded toward the heap of bags that Simra had piled against the wall. At the leaning spear, the hatchet, the two swords. There was a tight-lipped discomfort in his face.

“Something like that.” Simra drank. “In the south. The Rift. It was strange, Babu. The Nords there aren’t like Nords at all. They’re more—…” He stopped himself. When had talking with his father of the Velothi as they once were ever done anything but darken Sambidal’s mood? Now was not the time. “I fought with them, against them. It wasn’t…nothing was like I expected.”

“Nothing ever is. That is the way.” Sambidal glanced over his shoulder, towards the doorway and back, as Simra took the lid from the pot and flaked his last two smoked riverfish into the pot of near-cooked barley and clamped down the lid. “Who did you fight for? The jarl?” The term was awkward in Sambidal’s mouth.

“…Sort of. But no. I fought for me. For money.”

“It would be—…I would be a…” Sambidal searched for a word and came up dry. “It would be bad for me to say you were wrong. I did the same. Or…the same and not the same.” He tried a weak tired smile, shoulders slumped, arms curled inward as his hands held the teacup in his lap. “I never came back.”

Ishar always had a soft tread, near-silent and padfooted as a cat. The splash then sway of beads as the curtain parted a third time was the first sign she gave. Like Tiber Septim’s words, urging Cuhlecain to war, Simra knew she was come before he knew she was coming. She stood before the curtain, frozen, shrunken.

Once, Ishar’s hair had been yellow-white, shimmery like polished bone, not-quite-waving and not-quite-straight, like the hanging tresses of a willow-tree. Now its lustre was all gone with the last of its colour. Her hair hung lank and lifeless, and she, her lips, her face had all shed weight like a tree drops its leaves in Winter. Near-black, her eyes fixed on Simra, bottomless and emptied of everything but the glint of the fire and the glow of his magelight.

“Why are you here?” she said. Her voice was flat and drab and cold. “Why now?”

Simra had no answer. He scrambled to his feet, head bowed. An acrid fire begun in his belly, telling his knees to bend and his muscles to make ready. Fight or flee or snap still with fear.

“Ishar…” said Sambidal, soft, with one hand out to placate her. “Llerim? Bel-ha minabibi..?”

“Ammu… I came back,” Simra managed to say. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry you came back? Sorry you went? Why?” Her small deft hands bunched in the burnt-orange falls of her skirts.

“Why did I go, or why did I come back?” Simra’s lip twitched. No telling if it was a joke or a retort.

“Simra…” Sambidal shuffled round on his knees to face them both.

“Why now?” Ishar asked again. It was a groan. A jagged plea. “Urshi ka kaushi, why come back now?”

“I—”

“—I am not finished! Why come back now, Simra? Why now and not on one of all the nights I knelt and prayed you’d come through that door! You made me wait – no news, no warning – and then you made me hurt, and then when I couldn’t pray anymore, couldn’t hope anymore—”

“—I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry. I went because I wanted to help. I came back because I wanted to help!”

“You wanted to help so you left us? Tell me,” she leered. “Tell me how you wanted to help your family so much that you abandoned them without a word. How you threw away the work that fed us well and kept us warm and went out into the world to—…To do what, Simra? Story yourself — is that it? Make your fortune and make your fame?”

“For nine months! I was gone nine months. Less, even! And I was always going to come back.”

“Any mother — try to tell any mother that nine months is only a short while!” She shook her head, almost laughing.

“But you knew I’d come back. You said yourself, you waited, you hoped!”

“Llerim…” Sambidal tried again. “He is back now.” He switched switched to Dunmeris, imploring her. “That is enough of a gift, no?”

“I knew?” She tilted her face to the ceiling, eyes rolling back. “From what? From my wealth of experience in having my children leave me? First her, now you!” She lashed out an arm as Sambidal tried to touch her, steady her. “Don’t!” She flapped away his hand before turning her gaze on Simra again. “You saw what she did to me, Simra! You saw and still—!”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Simra snarled. “Don’t you dare drag Soraya into this — use her to hurt me when she can’t speak for herself. When you have no idea – no fucking idea—!”

And there it was. The temper he’d inherited from his mother. Her cold fury washed over him and stoked his own up hot. The fire in his belly spat and blazed. He felt his temper snap. After that he couldn’t stop.

“I saw,” Simra said. “You’re right, I saw. I was there while you waited, and I waited with you. I was there while you hoped, and I hoped along with you. But then you mourned like that would stop the hurt. You cut her out of your heart, like that would stop it.”

“She left us all, Simra,” Ishar hissed. “Me, your father, and you. She cut us all off long before I—”

“Before you what, Ammu? Before you started hating her ‘cos love was still too much fucking work? I saw it. I saw you miss her – she did that to you – but all the rest you did to your own fucking self, right? And now I’m back, what’s the problem? Now I’m sorry, what’s the problem?”

“It hurts! It hurts how little you care, it hurts again, I can’t—!” Ishar fell into a gush of words in Dunmeris, hard as kicks and slaps as Simra spoke over her, shouting now.

“Wrong! Don’t forget, I saw — I know ‘cos I saw. I know how you stop yourself caring when carrying on’s too much, and I know what the problem is now. You’d just got done caring. You’d just got done mourning, and I went and fucked that up. You – what? – you had it all planned out? How long before you stopped hoping? How long before giving up on me was just more fucking convenient?”

Ishar’s face was streaked wet and red with tears. She turned away, scowling pinch-featured into the hearthfire.

“Talk to your mother like that again…” Sambidal warned, face clouding over like the sky before a storm.

“And you’ll what?” Simra snapped. “Beat me for a brat? Just like old times, right?” He stepped back, reached into his trousers and tore away the pouch of coin he’d sewn hidden into the lining. “See this?” he bounced it, jangling in his palm. “It’s silver. All of it. Nineteen shillings Nordic and some Imperial, and I sold myself for six months for every single coin, to bring it back to you. To feed us! Clothe us! To fucking help us out of all this!”

He tossed the pouch onto the floor. The coins struck with a steely, many-faced chatter. In an eye-blink, Ishar twisted round and crouched to snatch it up.

“This?” she hissed. Crying had swollen her face and put rows of jagged teeth in her voice. “You think we wanted you out there, who-knew-where, risking ghosts-knew-what…for this!?” With a flex of her fingers, she tore open the pouch. Its contents sang shrill and riotous, shining as they spread across the floor. “We wanted you home!” she screeched. “I wanted you safe!”

“Oh! That explains the warm fucking welcome then, doesn’t it?”

Kissing his teeth, Simra turned heel on his mother and father and stormed towards the back of their warren. He snatched the sail-cloth curtain aside and passed through.

“Oh, very mature, Simra!” his mother howled after him. Victory in her voice, he thought. Like she’d already won, he thought. “Go! Hide in your room! Sulk in your bed! That’s the wisdom of age, hm? That’s my full-grown son, come back a man from seeing the wide world!”

But Simra ignored his side of the tapering stone-carved chamber. Everything was clear now — stark and sharp-edged and necessary. He stared into the niche opposite, where Soraya used to sleep. Where her wedding-jacket hung. He yanked it down from the hook that’d once held up her hammock. In the slightest shifting of the material, it gave out the mixed scents of its leather. Guar and dog-hide. The dusty salty shady aroma of netch-leather. He thrust his arms through its short belled sleeves. Felt the soft fur of its collar and the embroidered scrib-silk of its lining on him.

“You’re done forgetting her, then?” he said as he burst back through the curtain. He spun in the jacket, showing it off, gleeful and spiteful both at once. “Reckon you don’t need this, then? If you’ve given up on remembering her. Given up on her ever coming back? It might as well stay with someone who still gives a shit or two, right? And look — look at the fit!”

Simra bared his teeth. On the inside he was aching, but he made himself grin as his words jabbed and crowed out from him.

“Simra…”

He crouched by his pile of baggage. The silver coins still gleamed, a score or more, flat on the floor. Simra strapped on his swordbelt, gathered and shouldered his bags and flung his aketon over the crook of one arm.

“Simra, don’t…”

“Enjoy your fucking dinner,” he beamed. “Just the two of you, right? How you like it.”

Sambidal stepped close, taller than his son and looking down. “Simra, you are leaving your steel…”

“I know, right? Thank me later.”

“Lonya,” hissed Sambidal, turning the cradle-name into a threat. “You will not. You cannot. If they find out…If they find us…”

“So hide them. Like your special fucking sword.” Simra met his eyes, amber-red against reddish-amber. “Or whatever the fuck. I don’t care what you do. I’m done fucking caring.”

“Simra,” Ishar growled through a half-swallowed sob. “I swear to you by ash and by blood, if you leave—”

“So now you want me to stay?” Simra barbed, pushing past Sambidal, towards the door. “You’ll have to forgive me for getting the wrong end of the stick. Misunderstandings can be real fuckers, right? Really? Fucking really? You want me back – you want me to stay – you say so, alright? You give me a fucking reason. First time I left, that was your fault. That was me chasing you. Second time, fine, that’s on me, and I’m sorry. But now? Fuck that, we’re back where we started — go back to missing me, or forgetting me, or whatever the fuck, I’m done caring, right? I’m done.”

The curtain rattled one last time as he passed through, pulled on his boots, and carried on into the night.


	76. Chapter 76

“S’late, boy.”

“Fuck does ‘late’ mean to the Pale-Shod clan?” Simra kissed his teeth and shifted his weight, cocking one hip. “Don’t try play me off for a flatfoot, right? I know what you and your lot’re about.”

The man on the door was huge, solid, puffed up with more importance than his work deserved. From the outside, what he was guarding looked near to nothing at all. Scarce more than a crack in a timber-shored wall, down in the summer-dusty bottom of the Grey Quarter gorge.

“You got talks to have with the Pale-Shod clan, you’ll come back when it’s morning.” He punctuated his words, slapping the lead-dipped hardwood cosh he carried into the palm of one big pale hand.

Full of tact, this man, that much was clear… Simra’s hand twitched, tempted to tug aside the fleece of his mantle where he’d wrapped it round his sword. Just to give a quick flash of the steel he’d hidden — a threat to even their footing. But that was the vodka thinking for him. And more like than not, that was the kind of excuse this big man lived for. He was wider than the opening, and looked too tall even to stoop through. His hair and beard were sandy blonde. Unlikely he was a Pale-Shod by clan. He didn’t have their look. A hanger-on then, which meant the names of his betters might still swing weight with him.

“I’m not here to have words with the whole clan,” Simra said, bored, and bored of trying to sound sober. “Just Gitur. You might know her, might not, but she knows me, so… Wanna run along an’ ask her if she’s taking visitors?”

The man’s mouth moved like he was trying to uncatch something from between his backmost teeth. A thinking face — it takes a special kind of stupid to have a dedicated thinking face.

“Who’d I tell her’s come calling?”

“Simra Hishkari.” His lips curled out a lop-crooked line.

“Stay,” the man grunted, turned and somehow fit his bulk through the breach in the rock and timber wall.

“‘Stay,’” Simra repeated to himself. “Like talking to a fucking dog. Sit. Stay. Beg. Shit on that…” A flicker of anger flashed up, bitter in the back of his throat. He swallowed it back like bile, telling himself again how it was the drink, thinking for him, feeling for him. But wasn’t that what he’d wanted?

Even halfway drunk he knew better than to follow the man, or try to sneak in while the door was untended. Quarries once, like the Quarter itself, the Pale-Shod burrows twisted and mazed down too far and deep beneath the city to make sense to anyone but the Pale-Shods themselves. Even their sworn-hands and hirelings scarcely knew more than a few set paths through the tunnels and chambers where the clan stored their gains and made their homes. That darkness and difficulty defended them better than any number of cosh-armed guards. Out here in the alleys, the muscle that stood watch for them was a show of strength, not a ward against fear.

A wait later, the doorman poked his head out and into the evening again. This time he carried a hooded lantern as well as his cosh. “Says you’d best come in.” He gestured for Simra to follow.

Through the tunnels and cellar-spaces they moved, chasing the lantern’s narrow beam. Simra tried to memorise their route, like a game played against himself. Left, left, second right, down the ladder at the room with the well, then double back from facing the rungs… And then the scent crept into his mind, fitting to what he remembered of the last time he’d been here. Dried ginger, clean wool, fresh woodchips, a sourish and supple mineral something that he recalled more than smelt now. They let him know he was here.

“You can go, Kristav.” Somehow Gitur put raised eyebrows and a withering look into her voice. No need to see her to know they were there. But Simra reckoned she’d been practising long enough. “Go on, you’ve got…standing to do, or whatever we even pay you for.”

In all the chamber’s shadows and clutter, it was hard to place her until she moved. A flick of the wrist and hand, she shooed the doorman back the way he’d come. Then they were alone. The thought sunk Simra’s stomach deep and set his nerves to jangling. Something close to terror but twinned with relief. He closed his eyes, collecting himself before he let himself look.

Gitur lounged upright, legs curled beneath her, in what looked like a soft heaping of rag-stuffed sacks, each dyed a different lurid colour — crimson, blazing orange, sky blue, emerald. In the midst of it all her clothes were drab in colour. Pine-green long-skirted tunic, stippled at random with fine-patterned needlework; it wrapped to fasten at one side but opened at the collar in a brief stripe of freckles. Thick grey-blue woollens on her legs that blurred the lines between socks and hose. But for all that, her cheeks flushed high and her hair blazed bright as brass. A necklace of white glass and silver beads fell in loop after loop, laddering out and down her chest.

She gestured again, palm facing up this time. She was waiting.

Simra bit his cheek and furrowed his brow. “…like nothing’s changed?” he tried, finally.

“Well…that depends, right?”

“On..?”

“Oh. Well, for a start on WHAT THE FUCK YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING HERE, SIMRA HISHKARI?”

Simra flinched. Felt something muss up against one boot. He turned the flinch into a sharp twist towards the feeling. One of Gitur’s cats – fat and marbled white and grey, coiled between his feet like it was trying to trip him. “Uhm…” he bent to a low crouch, almost kneeling, and petted the cat behind one ear. “You let me in, didn’t you? You wanna be more specific? Here-here or in-Windhelm-here?”

“Gods send dogs to shit on your doorstep..!” Gitur groaned, dragging a hand down her face. On one finger she wore a ring of some carved green mineral — metal or stone, it was hard to tell. “Can I say both?”

“And can I say that maybe I just wanted to see somebody who might’ve been happy to see me..?” Simra looked up from the cat and braved looking Gitur in the face. His own features had gone into a kind of wince.

“Then why come to Windhelm? Y’know — the place where a prick with the money and time to fuck round holding grudges paid to have you killed? And yeah, before you ask, yeah, I fuckin’ heard about that. Big part of what I do, listening…” Gitur let out a strangled whine of frustration. “Just…Shor’s balls, Sim, d’you ever think more than five fucking minutes ahead? Arm’s reach outside whatever little scheme you’ve got going at the time? It’s not—…you’re not safe! You the way you are, or here where you are. You’re not!”

It wasn’t real anger. Simra had seen that in her before and knew it sounded sharp and flat, ragged with what might’ve been tears. This was only exasperation. That, he reckoned, was fair.

“So maybe that’s why I’m here?” he ventured, ignoring a drunken part of him that wanted to argue the issue. “Least I can think back enough to remember you and yours owe me a favour. You said so, didn’t you? Way back when?”

“Tssh!” Gitur let out a thick hiss, tongue against her teeth. “Like making a dead watchman disappear didn’t pay that back with interest!”

“…coulda left him if you’d’ve preferred? Let him fuck off and run mouth at some uptown prick, hm? About the kinda shit your family catch when they go fishing off the docks? Y’know, if I’d known that’s what you wanted—”

“Point. Fuckin’. Taken, Sim.”

“So…”

“Yeah. Yeah… Like nothing’s changed. Herma-fuckin’-Mora, sure as snow looks like it.”

Looking around put the lie to that. This was not the room he remembered from before. Dim-lit back then, and half-blind with drink as he might’ve been, he was sober enough now to see that only the scent hadn’t changed. Like it had followed her to this new chamber, crowded luxuriant with all these new things.

Crates painted bright with patterns of diamonds, low to the floor, formed an island table in the room’s middle. On it, thick and thin ranges of candles burnt, pooling wax out onto a trio of engraved pewter dinnerplates. Under Simra’s dusty boots, the floor was all dyed sailcloth, woven and tassel-edged carpets — not a single scant glimpse of cold stone. A cabinet of carved and polished wood stood against one wall. Its doors were windowed, slatted with curling antlers that wove and interwove like vines along a garden wall. Behind the slats the cabinet was packed with bottles, so far as Simra could tell. To Gitur’s side was a doorway, hung with a beaded curtain that would’ve looked more welcome in a Dunmer home, up in the Rigs. No bed in here, so the curtain marked it as an antechamber — somewhere liminal Gitur had set up for herself.

“Looks like you’ve done alright,” Simra observed. He let out a low whistle that died off into a sigh. “This place is nice.”

“Yeah, well…” Gitur puffed, combing a fistful of fingers through her thick hair. “A lady’s gotta have a parlour, right? Can’t just gab with every raggedy fuck comes out the alleys in the same room I sleep in, can I?” Simra’s cheeks started to burn. “Ain’t done yet, though. Still improvements to make, y’know… You’ve done fine too though, hey? In – what? – less than a year? …Nice jacket.”

“S’not mine and you know it,” Simra muttered.

“Still nice. And you’re wearin’ it, ain’t you? The rest’s all naming snow. Semantics.”

“Good word,” Simra smiled. “Where’d you scavenge that one from?”

“You,” Gitur snorted. “Or some other jumped-up little milk-drinker like you.”

“Nchow..! There aren’t any other jumped-up little milk-drinkers like me. Not down here anyway.”

“You say that like we’re not all better off for it.”

A thought swam up unbidden into Simra’s mind. Did she feel better off without? Hard to tell with Gitur, when what passed for friendship with her would as soon be seen as bullying if it came from anyone else. The best Simra could ever do was keep up. Like nothing’s changed…

“So anyway,” she carried on, business-straight and smooth again. “You wanted to talk favours.”

“Yeah, I mean…” Simra tailed off. Stood up once more. “Dunno that it’s anything big, just—… I mean, I’m back for a bit, right? And you said yourself. About Torbjorn-fucking-Shattershield and all. So…”

“You need somewhere to stay. Lay low. That it?”

Simra’s blush deepened with relief. “That’s about the short of it, yeah.”

“Well shit. Yeah. I can see why you wouldn’t want your parents swamped up in all that.”

“Yeah… But it’s kinda…not that. So, I went home already, right? I mean, I’ve been home and…”

“Oh. Oh..!”

“Yeah. S’like that. They – uhm – they weren’t all that pleased to see me and…” Simra drew in a sharp breath. All the heat had gone from his cheeks now. A moment later it had started to flood and prickle at the corners of his eyes.

“Pigshit. Fuck. Alright, Sim, drop your stuff and sit the fuck down, hey?”

Gitur was standing now. Not touching him, but nearish by. Close enough to put a sick shame in it when his eyes welled up and the first sob struggled out. He shrugged violent out of his bags and let them fall. He shuffled then collapsed into the muddled couch-bedding of stuffed sacks. Hunched over himself, head in his hands, he felt his face start to ache. His palms were hot and wet. The sobs came broken and jagged as shard-glass. Like before, he saw himself and couldn’t stop.

“Alright, Sim. It’s alright. Shh…” Gitur was somewhere near him still. He felt rather than saw her weight huff down into the sacks alongside him. “I’m gonna—… Uhm…”

A hand on his shoulder. Then another settling warm and solid over the other as his back shook and tremored. The sudden invasion of touch, grounding him.

“Is that…is that alright? Tell me, right? I mean, if you’d rather I didn’t? Gods, Simra, you’re a fuckin’ mess, you know that?”

“I know…I know…”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not here for you, mind. Fuck knows why, but I am…”

“I know…I’m sorry…Thank you…”

“Really though. Shipwrecks happen, ships stay wrecked. Stop moving. You though? Wreck after wreck after wreck and you don’t fuckin’ stop, do you?”

“You were right…That time under the willow…By the Wheel-House…” Simra’s voice was raw already. “You said I’d go out…Fuck everything up…‘Cos I’d never be happy here…You were right…”

“Nah. You came back, didn’t you? Twice. Fuck knows why… I mean, what’s there to keep you?”

“Fucked if I know…” The final sob turned into a laugh. A gurgling shattered giggle. Simra felt teeth against his palms as his face broke into a grin. “Fair weather an’ fine company..?”

Gitur slapped his back and fell away with another snort. No more pressure of hands at his shoulders. No more breath fluttering moth-shy in the stray locks of his hair.

“I need to get drunk…” Simra groaned. “I need to get drunk fuckin’ immediately.”

“Tssht…Yeah, well, dont’ come cr—…I mean, don’t come to me when it’s morning and you feel like a pig shat in your head, right? Me? I’m going to bed. And you, Simra Hishkari, are staying right where you are if you’ve got any skimpy little strips of a clue left in your head about what’s good for you.”

Gitur blew out the candles and plunged the room into darkness. The curtain rattled as she passed through.

Simra kicked round with one foot, searching for his bags and the half-empty bottle he’d carried with him. No use. The goal of his fumbling turned in on itself as he toed at the heels of his boots, slipping them down his calves and off. He was tired. Sore. But smiling maybe. Just maybe. Just a little.


	77. Chapter 77

_There was always talk amongst the mercenaries and fyrdmen, oathbands and levies that made up the Eastmarch armies that marched into the Rift. Talk of all kinds. Talk of food and drink. Fretting over the nature of our enemies, the reasons behind our fighting. But what spread quickest between mercenary companies and mustered armies – quick as a flu or a flux – was always news, gossip, tall and small tales of things that always happened just beyond the horizon._

_And what seemed to drive so many of the Nords among the Red Vahn’s mercenaries, and so many of the Eastmarchers among the fyrds – what few I spoke to, and what, more often, I heard from those who had spoken to them – was this. That Ulfric Stormcloak himself marched with them. That, when the battle-lines formed and shieldwalls met, he fought alongside them. Stories about him spread quicker and wilder than most._

_That he held his shieldwall’s center at a battle on the plain, when on his left and right, both flanks broke. But to the men around him, he called in a voice that was loud as thunder, and had them stand their ground, and bend their line inward — first a horseshoe, then a ring, banked up with shields and bristling with spears and rippling with swords and axes whenever any Riftman came past the thicket of spearheads. That the center of his army held and drove their enemies off._

_That, in the final clash between the independent Riftfolk clans, and Ulfric’s fyrds and mercenaries and the cavalry of the clans that had taken up with him and joined their banners to his, in sight of the walls of Riften itself, he was there again. That he was there as his line withstood hail after hail of bowfire, and under his command, the line held. That he was there when the Riftfolk rode closer and began to throw javelins, and still they held. But also, somehow, he was there amongst the heaviest cavalry that sallied over the horizon and crashed into the rear of the Riftfolk’s final charge, crushing them between shields and mounted steel. He was there with spear and sword, on horseback as much as on foot somehow. And in both stories, mounted or grounded, it was his Voice – his Shout – that shattered the resolve of the Riftfolk clans and routed them, off to the edges of the Rift._

_And that’s the strangeness at work here. For everyone I’ve spoken to since coming back to Windhelm also says that Ulfric has been here the entire time. In the city. Safeguarding the heart of Eastmarch – Skyrim’s ancient seat of kings, as Windhelmers have started to remind themselves, more and more often – with Voice and sword, with his housecarls and thanes. Here all the while, as his most trusted bolyars marched out with the fyrds to earn the Rift’s loyalty. As another handled the negotiations for peace and the acceptance of oaths in Riften. The name of an Eastmarch bolyar is one I’ve heard oftenest, when I asked Gitur and others who they reckon to be heading these talks. One Laila True-Tongue of the Fen-Tamer clan…_

_Yet with everyone I spoke to among the mercenary camps at Riften, the view was that Ulfric Stormcloak was with them in the city, holding the talks at the palace himself._

_With truth having turned so strange and multiple, everything starts to look like a well-turned lie. Everyone sees Ulfric’s hand in every change or shift of things. And times, it bears noting, are changing before our eyes…_

 

“Papers,” muttered Simra. “Papers now… Can’t just be me thinks there’s a bad smell about that.”

“Don’t reckon you’re the only one,” said Gitur. “But if us milkskins think it, guess there’s not many who think there’s cause to say anything out loud…”

“Reckon not.” Simra took a long draught of the pinkish pale ale they were sharing. A foamy beer that tasted of tart white peaches and stale white bread, it was the Pine and Patches cornerclub’s newest acquisition. To Simra it was easy enough to drink, and being seen with Gitur made it cheap. “Not your people they’re numbering, is it?”

She pouted. Her eyes dropped to the head of her beer. “You’re not wrong, but that don’t mean you’re all the way right. It’s people we work with. The people we live with. Grey Quarter people. That’s our people enough that the Pale-Shods’re worried…”

Not worried enough to do a blighted thing about it, Simra thought. But then, what could a Grey Quarter underbelly clan – barely Nords at all in the eyes of their uptown betters – do against the clans of the Stone Quarter? The constant push from the Palace of Kings?

“Mind you, them up there’ve pretty much shouted themselves hoarse with singing praises for the whole thing…” Gitur gathered the red-gold fall of her hair into a fist and combed her clawing fingers through it. “What I hear, there’s a lot been said about how it’s for the city’s own good. No count made of you Dunmer back when you came needing shelter and ended up staying, and there’s the same old pigshit getting spouted ever since ‘bout how you’ve been breeding like rats the whole while…”

Simra kissed his teeth. “We don’t though! Pretty much can’t. That’s the whole thing with elves, right? Takes longer to get to an age where breeding’s likely to take, and even then we’re just not as—…” Simra made a vague gesture in the air and huffed.

“‘Not as’..?” Sideways along the cornerclub’s polished bar, Gitur gave Simra a sly smile. “Good to know…”

“You know what I mean,” Simra scowled. “And you know we’ve got odds enough against us without the fucking Damp Lung, Bonebreak Fever, Chordy, and cold and hunger getting to those of us that do end up getting born…”

“Still though…there have been kids born in the Quarter since then, right? Plenty. You can’t sit there, being what you are, and tell me I’m wrong, can you? So the jarl, his bolyars and carls, they pull this accounting on you all, and to everyone uptown it looks good. Those who don’t like you think it looks like he’s doing something about you. ‘Measuring the infestation’ or whatever the fuck, to see what the drain’s like on what the city’s got. The bleeding hearts up there think it looks like he’s reaching out, giving a shit — thinking what it’d take to help the Quarter out…”

“But what it mostly means is they get a look at who’s where and when, right? Who leaves the city, how long they’re gone. Who comes in. All of us, named, numbered, and needing to fucking announce ourselves at any gate we wanna get through…”

“Mmh.” Gitur’s lips thinned to nothing. Her mouth became a hard straight line. “Yeah. But there’s other talk from Nords down here ‘bout how it’s all practice. See if it works with you, then we all get numbered too. Little while later, the jarl knows all of a sudden what he stands to gain in a tax crackdown — how many shields he can count on if he goes hard on conscription again. Shit times all round, and shittier times coming…”

But as ever, it was starting in the Quarter. The worst of whatever was coming, the Dunmer would always suffer through it first. Simra remembered Kathras Ulvaen, the Dunmer conscript from the Quarter he’d met in the camps outside Riften. It was visibility that got him caught by the guards uptown, and sent down to the Rift to fight. Numbered, named, recorded in their movements — the Grey Quarter wouldn’t hide them anymore. Papers meant visibility, always, everywhere.

“Bright side though…” Simra realised. “When looking’s easy, people get lazy about looking hard, right?”

Gitur drank. Kissed her teeth in turn. “Fuck’re you riddling ‘bout, Sim?”

“Torbjorn fucking Shattershield,” he hissed in a stage-whisper. “If he’s still got an eye out, he’ll be looking for a new name on the books. New tries for papers, right? Easiest way to tell if I’m back. But if my name never comes up, who’s to say I ever came back? Who’s to say I didn’t die in the Rift somewhere?”

“Yeah, well… Tssht. I won’t tell if you don’t, but… How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long d’you think you can keep that up? How long before threats start coming in for elves without papers? New laws and punishments. Before or after they try paper all the rest of us too, d’you reckon..?”

“Long enough for me, I reckon…”

Gitur turned her face away from Simra, but her eyes locked on his. He’d seen her give him that look before. A warning, dawning look. “I know you, Simra Hishkari… I know you better than pretty much anyone else you’ve got, and I swear to you…”

“Swear to me what?” he grinned.

“Shit… Nothing. You get it into your head you’re gonna clever-clever your way into doing something stupid, there’s no amount’a wise council’s gonna stop you, is there? Like I said, I oughtta know that by now. Fuck…”

“So that’s what you are now? My ‘wise council’?”

“Shut your face and drink your drink, will you? That’s my fucking council. Take it or leave it.”


	78. Chapter 78

“These.” Simra brought a cloth-wrapped package from inside his satchel and set it down on the counter. It was the blue Stormcloak shawl, folded into a neat square, for all its insides were bulky and irregular. “Please, sera, if you’d take a look..?”

Revyn Sadri’s features shifted. As his brows rose, deepening the lines of his forehead, his bat-large ears twitched lower. With a priestlike air, he flexed his long fingers and leant towards the counter, sliding the package through the gap beneath its iron bars.

“I keep the strictest of confidences, ser, and I’m sure you’ll understand…” Sadri began, voice reedy and waver-ranging. His careful hands hovered over the package. “But just as I’ll ask you no questions, ser, I’ll request that you tell me no lies as to just what we have here. Fair business and clear-water dealings. Am I clear? Good…”

Like a shoal of slaughterfish rushing to feed, Sadri’s fingers opened the shawl and started to pluck at its contents. Simra watched, face impassive, as the shopkeeper picked them over and laid them out. A pair of newly-cleaned turnshoes in soft leather. A waxed-hide pouch of pipe-resin for smoking. A flint-and-steel kit in a box of carved and runed horn. A ring of work-smoothed bone, engraved with runes that read ‘promise’. And a necklace, steel chain for half its length and braided cord for the rest. From the chain hung fourteen motley white teeth, each set in a crude mould of dull silver.

“You know, ser, I have a reputation to uphold. A reputation worth upholding,” Sadri continued as he frowned, examining each piece, turning them over, hand between hand and finger by finger. He held up the promise-ring before a hooded ruby-red eye. “I deal in nothing but legitimate goods. Things of quality, whether new-made or of more…enduring workmanship…”

Simra held back a groan.

Sadri had been one of the Quarter’s more successful shopkeeps since before Simra was born, but that hardly warranted the airs he put on. Shaped-glass optics perched on the heavy beak of his nose. A choker of shilling-sized brass medallions rounded his neck and trailed a chain-linked array of triangular enamelled plaques down into the deep neck of his rust-red and lobster-blue patterned kurta. Every triangle in the necklace was painted with a miniature sigil, one for each of the Reclamations. And in the cartilage of his left ear he wore a ring of gold, pendant with a tiny bell that jingled as he moved his head. It wasn’t so much the showiness that Simra begrudged him. It was the unctuous talk — the illusions he let himself live under, when the truth of his business was hoarded up all round him.

Junk. Second and third and fifth hand things, bought and pawned. Bargained for cheap from the local shrines, who kept as tithes whatever had belonged to those who died without family to pay for their rites, or whose families had no other way to buy them. He was a grave-robber, a dealer in loans and one-time collateral. But most often, Revyn Sadri was a fence — Soraya had taught Simra that fact early on. Nod and smile along with the wild-haired mer and he’d buy anything you’re selling, no questions asked.

On everything but meals and drinks, Simra reckoned, haggling had a pattern to it. Wherever he was, that pattern stayed the same. Both buyer and seller suggested a price the other could never accept, then pushed and pulled to meet in the middle. Like a tug-of-war, success was all a matter of getting the middle where you wanted it — or close as you could.

Simra and Sadri put pleasantries aside a few breaths after they’d each named their first price. After that it was all sallies and standgrounds; parries and replies of feigned insult and mock apology. But Simra’s indignation was all too real.

“These? The settings on those teeth? They’re silver, every one! Weight for weight there’s more there than’d go into two shillings and you expect me to settle for less than one? Nchow..!”

“Be that as it may, ser, silver is only silver until some revered king or enterprising jarl has seen fit to stamp their face on it. Weight for weight makes no matter to honest traders. Unless, that is, you take me for a forger..?”

Pointed speech and politeness bandied back and forth. Slow and with slipping patience, they both fought themselves into the same corner.

“Two shillings silver, one-and-a-half pence copper,” said Sadri. “That’s my final offer and that’s for the lot.” It was the third final offer he’d made by now.

“Fine…” Simra counted coins in his head, figuring what coins that might change down to. Twenty-five and a halfpenny in copper… He didn’t trust Sadri not to try and gouge him at the last stretch, betting on poor arithmetic. That wouldn’t happen. With the coin in mind, Simra nodded. “Fine.”

Sadri turned his back to fiddle with a set of lockboxes and clasped drawers, bolted down in the shopfront’s rear. When he faced Simra again, he skimmed five thick Nordic coins onto the counter. One silver, two Eastmarch black iron, one whole copper and one cut down to a half-moon — each had its own music.

“Ah…” Simra cracked an apologetic half-smile. “Any other time, I’d take yourt coin as it comes in and be thankful, but…for what I’ve got got in mind, the iron’s not ideal.”

“Nchow…” Sadri chided. But he pawed in the two black pennies once more, and swapped them for another shilling. “Take it,” he said, flat and cold. “Take it. Go. And tell your friends and family how kind and accommodating I can be…”

It was less than the lot were worth, piece by piece or else summed up. Simra knew that. But all told, he reckoned it was as good a price as he’d find in the Quarter, selling fast and all at once. It would do. Silver is silver, and speaks beyond borders.

Sadri’s Used Wares burrowed into the Quarter’s stone walls, where the gulleybottom broadened out into the disused drydocks that made up the Morayat. After that, the way shaded towards the docks, the waterfront, and the White River’s wide brown current. But Simra turned back, deeper into the Quarter.

With his spearhead-knife held close in his tunic, he walked deeper into the Quarter, along its dusty floor. While Torbjorn Shattershield still posed even the pale shadow of a threat, let Gitur watch the docks and listen to the ship’s captains and wayfarers. Simra had searching of his own to do among the maze of narrow alleys that fractured off from the Quarter’s central gorge. Close-drawn cricks of leaning stone. Huddles of shadow and bundles of rags.

 

_Two days I searched, checking everywhere I knew to look. Asking in ale-sinks and cornerclubs, even, on the off-chance someone there might have seen him. A legless tangle-bearded Nord, full of stories, and with a Whiterun look about him. No luck. No sign of Ostwulf. At least not amongst the days I had to spare._

_Because I’ve been dreaming. Or having dreams. Though it’s not so much the dreams that’re hard to contend with. Of all things, dreams’re merciful in how patchy they make my memories of them. But there’s a window of time when I wake from them where the past and the present and the dream collide. Portioned and partitioned, I am left confused._

_I thrash awake in Gitur’s parlour knowing parts of me are elsewhere. The dark and floating dust of Kitlun’s hall. The scent of Moridene’s blood’s copper and thick on the air. Her voice rises broken and panicked, the one part of her the healers and their helpers can’t hold down. The Rift’s wooded south. A screaming horse and gaining hooves. Kjeld tells me what he tells me. The sound of streamwater and scent of burnt hair, seared fat. The jolt through my arm as my sword’s heavy pommel strikes bone til what’s firm beneath it turns soft. Stairs and stairs upward. A sharp near-silent something swoops on me like a hawk and beaks through my back. Knock and hook the breath from me before I smell cut wood, spun wool, root-ginger, and know the truth of where I am._

_Faces too where no faces were before. The hot cloy of blood on my hands and drying on my skin. The feel of flesh tooled apart by steel — my flesh and my weapons and my working hands working against me, like I’m both the one wounding and wounded. And the only thing harder than stopping up my scream is bringing myself to make any sound at all._

_That’s why I wanted to find Ostwulf. Tell him the things I’d done and seen, and see if he could make sense of them. Put them to order. Maybe even turn it all into something I can be proud of, at least if he seemed proud of me…_

_But he’s gone. Or doesn’t want to be found. Or maybe I dreamt him too. Like I dreamed of glory and riches, and instead gathered my head full of ghosts._

_The fighting isn’t hard at the time. The terror’s there, and the pain, the brief spur-flashes of rage. But in the moment, they’re all there is. And it’s almost easy. Perhaps because you’re not yourself but the self you wear like armour to protect who you are from what you’ve done and still must do. It’s living with all that inside you where the difficulty comes in._

_I’ve killed men. And I’ve heard that bandied round so often as something to boast about. But there’s times I can’t think it without a shame thick as paint coming lurid along with it. Funny thing is that I don’t think, even with Ostwulf to talk to, that I could make peace with that fact just yet. If that’s a part of me now, no doubt I’ll need it again…_

_And other selves as well, I reckon. Some to wear like armour, others to don like masks._

 

Pine-resin incense. Clay dishes smoldered pitchy in each corner of the room. A few more were scattered throughout. At least as many as there were candles lit. Fat stubs of bleeding wax, hearted round a cloth-twist wick, their glow was golden but the scent was sour. Gitur said the incense was to cover up the smell. To Simra it only made his eyes sore and heavy. He blinked hard to lash away the smoke.

“Could just magic us some light, you know…”

“I know.”

“Well. D’you want me to?”

“Can you not?”

“That depends…” With Gitur behind him, Simra sat on her rug-strewn floor. He faced off away from her, toward one blank corner of the parlour, where an iron-banded seachest crouched, braced against the wall. “Depends if you’re sitting here burning wax for no good reason ‘cept that you’re scared.”

Gitur curled a hank of his hair round a finger. A jolt of pain through Simra’s scalp as she pulled it, sharp and sudden. He hissed in surprise.

“Don’t think cos I can’t see your ugly mug that I can’t hear you smirking, Sim. Your spritelight’s got a colour to it and that’s just what we don’t need. Less you want me to get the dye-job wrong and leave you looking even worse?”

Her fingers went back to work, gentle again, folding and tangling the greasy dye into his hair. That was hard to take, even without her sat on a crate behind him, knees spraddled either side of his shoulders. It divided him. Part of him was full of the old familiar fret and flinch that came with touch. The urge to pull away, like a hand from the heat that burnt it. But under that was a kernel of something, hard to admit as it was to deny. That he wanted to stay like this. That he wished they had a better reason than the one they had.

“Besides,” Gitur continued, “it’s tallow.”

“…you what?”

“The candles,” she explained, mock-patient. “It’s tallow, not wax. S’why it stinks.” She paused. “Guess you’ve got no reason to know the difference, right? Don’t imagine you ever had much cause for candles. Not with your mam and you…”

Simra frowned. Almost a wince. “Yeah…not if we could help it. Candles cost coin, right?”

Growing up, the lighting of lamps and candles was a rare thing. Something Ishar did at her little shrine by the hearth, to speak to her ancestors, or more often to listen — it was a sign she wanted to be left alone with them. Or else it was a way his father had of admitting his worry that Ishar was out in the Quarter and would likely be gone most of the night. Either way was a kind of ritual. He didn’t want to talk about it. Gitur did him the mercy of moving their talk along.

“And – what? – callin’ a glowing thing from out of Oblivion to light your elf-hole comes for free?”

“Tssht…” The noise started as a snort but ended as a hushing hiss between Simra’s teeth. “Pretty much, yeah. Save where you can, spend where you can’t, right?” Gitur’s fingertips found his temples. Roved up to his forehead, dragging the dye’s thick dark feel with them. “Besides,” Simra continued, “that’s not how it works.”

“…Yeah. I know. I just…dunno how it does, alright?”

“It’s like…” Simra knitted his brows as he thought. “Shit, I dunn even know really, it’s just like…Searching round for a thought in my head that’s the right shape, sort of. Or making one. Then getting it outside me and asking it to shine. You get used to it…”

“Your light always comes out red. That mean all your thoughts are too?”

“Fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Simra scoffed.

By the shift of her knees and hands, Simra felt Gitur shrug. “Or maybe it’s not all of them. Just the ones that want out. Anyway, hold still. Gotta wash this shit clear…”

She tilted Simra’s head back into a basin she held in her lap. Fingercomb by fingercomb, she inched the excess from out his hair, fingertips difficult against his scalp. At least she’d already untangled whatever was tangled there. When she was done, she pushed his shoulder with a hand, telling him wordless to turn.

“How’s it look?” Simra asked. He could see the black-brown fall of a lock, blurred out the corner of his eye, but nothing else. Just Gitur, sitting open-kneed on her crate, woven round with whispers of incense, and haloed with a thicket of red-gold curls.

“Different,” she said, pensive, chewing the inside of one cheek. “You look different.”

“That’s the idea. Reckon that means you did a good job, right?”

“Reckon we’ll have to do your eyebrows too, but… Well. Take a look.”

Gitur stood in a sudden sigh of overskirts. She crossed through the beaded curtain into her bedroom. When she came back she was holding a mirror of burnished copper, a forearm across and a little more in height. It was shaped like an arched doorway. Its surface rippled with flats and ridges, remembering the hammer from the way it was wrought.

“Different…” Simra agreed.

His hair had grown long, past his jaw by now and near enough to his collarbones when it hung loose. In length it had taken on a windswept wildness, too fine to hold still or stay put when tied up, not quite straight but not truly curling. Now they had dyed it a deep gloss-brown, to help him become someone else for a while. And except for the sameness of his features, it had worked. Same long nose, pronounced and twice-broken. Same scarred mouth that stiffened where it should smile. On the surface of the mirror they twisted and rippled, turning his eyes to dark hollows and his cheeks to smooth bone. Still the same though. Still the same.

“Did you mean it,” he said, hesitant, “earlier? When you said I was ugly?”

Gitur’s lips half-lidded themselves and her lips curled into a dismissal. “Really, Sim? What d’you think?”

Simra knew what he thought. That’s why he’d asked, hoping she might tell him different.


	79. Chapter 79

Here the city’s foundations tumbled down to meet the river, on the jostling borders between the Morayat and the docks proper. A row of deep-carved nooks drilled back into the stone. Some had been boathouses once, for wintering hulls and drying timbers, but now the Crow and Corn was packed in between a thriving brothel and a struggling mapper’s shop. Not quite a cornerclub, not quite an ale-sink. Not quite a bawdyshop, not quite a boardinghouse. Mostly, Gitur had told him, the Crow and Corn was a place for meeting in.

Above its entrance hung a single lantern, glowing red through the parchment stretched across its frame. On each of the lantern’s faces the shape of a bird swooped in silhouette, talons reaching out to snatch up an ear of grain. Simra passed under it and through the curtained doorway. Outside the night was warm, balmed and heady and brightspread with stars, but past the curtains was dim-lit and cool as a root-cellar. Moments ago Simra’s aketon had him sweating. Now he was glad of the extra layer.

The inside stretched back underground, low-vaulted ceiling and reed-strewn floor. A short cat-eyed woman – Bretic maybe, or Nordic with one or two generations of merish blood muddled into her mix – sat at a round table. A few inches past its roots, her straight mouse-brown hair was dyed a fading red. Despite the chill she flapped near-constant at herself, eyeing Simra over the splayed out bones of a lacework fan.

“Who’s it you’re here to see, sweetshine?” Her voice was smooth with use, like old age-polished wood. “Canda? Dolorae? Yohn?”

Simra’s mouth stiffened beneath the powder that Gitur had used to hide his scars. But it made sense, he supposed. This was a meeting-place, he’d been told, and that meant it had as many purposes as there were reasons to meet. But the main reasons to be on the docks of a night came back to the same root cause: rutting, drinking, drugs, or the brokering of backhand deals.

“Tonight?” Simra said, halfway into an accent that wasn’t quite his own. It borrowed heavy from the tones he’d grown used to in the Rift. All that mattered here was that it sounded less than local, but he’d practised all the same. “Sad to say, tonight’s all business. It’s Nurama I’m here to see. Said she’d get herself a booth?”

The hostess painted a smile over her disappointment and flicked open a small pocketbook, tracing a finger down one page. “Eighth booth on the left,” she said. “Don’t fret none, she’s not been here long. Well, not overlong, at least.”

“I’m grateful.” Simra fell into a deep nod but angled his head up to clip the woman a curt smile. “Still…seems I’ve got a thirst on. A hunger maybe too. Be thankful of whatever you can give to help that, hm?”

The woman bobbed her head. “I’ll send a girl, sure, see if I don’t. Only…would you prefer she knock first?”

Simra raised his brows. “Don’t imagine Nurama and I have anything to hide. Just business, just like I said.”

Past the Crow and Corn’s open mouth, with its table and hostess and niches for candles, the place’s throat ran back into a narrow corridor, lined with curtained and wicker-walled booths. Simra stopped at the eighth on the left and dipped through the curtain.

Nurama Suradrin was a tall Dunmer woman, so gangle-limbed that the booth and bench that horseshoed round its central table both looked cramped around her. Her legs were clad almost to the hip in boots of salt-flecked sealskin, held up with ties and stays by a wide studded belt that cinched the waist of her blue-grey linen doublet. Her face was lined and wind-worn, pocked at the cheeks and neck. In the gleam-and-shade of candlelight, it looked as cratered and dark-troughed as the moons. All the hair before her ears was shaved to a short tonsure. The rest hung in long grey rat-tail braids, a ways down her back. Only the open ledger, the pens and inks open and arrayed on the table, gave any hint that she was a scribe. Otherwise she looked every inch the sailor.

“Evening,” said Simra, sliding across from her onto the bench. “Heard I’ve kept you waiting.”

“I’m still here,” she said. Her voice was leathern, breathy. “So you can’t have kept me any longer than I was willing to wait, now can you?”

“No need to say I’m sorry then, but I got us some to eat and drink all the same.”

Nurama inclined her head in cold acknowledgement, cleaned off and dipped the nib of one pen. A moment later it was poised over a half-filled page in the ledger. “To business then. Don’t imagine you’re here for the pleasure of my company. Your name, ser?”

“Katharas Ruvaen,” said Simra, not a beat missed. This was the self he’d stitched, to wear for the task at hand. Dark-haired, blunt-spoken, coarse-accented Katharas. He leaned across the table to squint upsidedown at the fresh marks Nurama had made. “That’s Are-You-Vee-Ay-Ee-En…”

A girl in a high-necked and slash-skirted red wool dress cut through the curtain, carrying a wooden trencher. Slices of cooked goose, and leeks and onions roasted in the bird’s fat, all steaming-hot. A pickled tomato, sliced in halves, and a small dish of garlic and horseradish sauce. A heel of brown barley-bread. She laid them down with a jug of dark beer and two clay cups.

Simra fished two coppers out onto the table. She swept them up and was gone.

Nurama sat silent and slow-blinking through all the setting. Still, Simra caught her eyes wandering, gazing hungry at the steam that poured off the dinner he’d laid on. No hot food on the high seas, he reckoned — if anything’d make her grateful, it’d be this.

“So, sera… Your birthsign?”

“The Tower,” Simra answered, pouring Nurama’s cup full of beer before half-filling his own.

“Soon then? Happy returns on it.” She drank. Picked at a cut of meat. “And what’s your profession? What is it you do?”

Simra leaned slouching against the bench-back. “Over here I do what needs doing for whoso’ll pay me best to do it. Imagine I’ll do much the same wherever I am…”

“Your work, then… Is it the sort where you’ll have tools to bring with you?”

Simra’s mouth pursed in thought. “Oh. You mean like arms, armour and suchlike?”

Nurama nodded. “That’s extra’s why I ask.”

“How much extra?”

“Half a shilling. Two yera. What you will. Same flat sum, though you can make up the coin as catch can.”

“Not that I’m arguing, but…all that for a sword? Nchow. I can wear that on my hip the whole while. Won’t do a thing to clutter your ship, I promise you that. Call it fourpence here and now and we’ll forget about it, hey?”

“Fair enough, sera,” Nurama smirked. She was a ship’s purser. There’d be little she liked better than a deal. All the better one that slipped coin straight into her pocket without staining the pages of her ledger first. “It’s a brave man goes selling his steel in a strange land with only a sidearm to his name. I can respect that…”

Simra set down another two coppers. Prompt and practised, Nurama made them disappear.

“The rest’s two-hundred-fifty drakes, I’m told? In whatever coin suits?” Simra tore off a hank of bread and carried meat, sauce, and a crushed shred of tomato to his mouth. “How much more for some – uh – discretion into the bargain?”

“You’ll find the man I work for doesn’t ask near so many questions or write down half so many answers as the counting crews set up in the other cornerclubs. If that’s what you’re asking?”

“No call for papers, then, and no need to know much more than the coin I’m good for?”

“If that’s the kind of service you need…”

“Then I’m good for it,” Simra grinned. “Matter of fact, I’m good for three-hundred in straight silver, if that’s the sort of service you can give me. If I’ve got your word on it..?”

“Then you’ve got my word.” Nurama was smiling too, clear and genuine, or close enough as made no matter. “The Cedarsnake will sail on Frostfall third. If all’s to plan and purpose, we’ll be afloat close to your Signing Day, hm?”

Simra snorted a short half-laugh. “Not so close as you’d think.”

He slipped back through the Morayat once the meeting was done. No drums that night amongst the tents. The ashlanders were quiet, like something had pitched them headlong into mourning. Only one voice sang somewhere distant, muffled by darkness, breeze-buckled and warped by the wind. A high-throated song, all strange trills and eddies in the sound of it, in words Simra couldn’t make out.

The song died away for distance soon enough, but followed him on through the Quarter, sounding out in Simra’s mind. It filled the gulleybottom’s late-night near-silence. Moaning air in the creviced stone. The arguments of cats. An unseen beggar’s fit of broken coughing. Overhead, the breathy creak-and-creech of the wooden Rigs. And in Simra’s head, that echoing single-voiced song that sounded so much like prayer.

He knew his route through the Pale-Shod tunnels by now, and any walking muscle on watch knew him better than to stop him. In Gitur’s parlour, Simra shrugged out of his aketon. The night had been too hot for it, but he’d left Soraya’s jacket safe with Gitur and worn the aketon all the same. For playing the part of Katharas the sellsword, the rust-red quilted jack was as much a piece of costume as the dye in his hair or the concealing-powder that hid his scars. Under it, he felt stale with sweat. Kneeling by a basin of cold well-water, Simra spelled himself clean. Slid off his boots. Found his way to the pile of rag-stuffed sacks that made up his bed. And when he slept, the sleep was poor — jagged and restless, hopeless and helpless for dreams.

 

_I wake and can’t move. Something weighs on my back. It pins me face-down. I’m transfixed. The cloth of my rag-pile bed smells like dust and tastes of forest floor. Mulch hard against my mouth. I’m awake but still hearing the sound of hooves. They’re closing. They close. Me this time, run down and cracked open like a seabird breaking into an oyster. That’s fair. I know it’s fair. But that does nothing to kill the fear that locks my limbs and keeps the dream on me even past the point of waking._

 

Simra looked over the passage. A block of fever-quick scrawl, crammed into one corner of his journal’s latest page like it was retreating from something. His lip curled. Those were words he didn’t want set out and clear for the reading. Even for all the tongue-tie and panic, the dizzy oracle’s vagueness, it looked to him too much like guilt. Confession. Biting his lip for concentration, Simra blotted out the block of text, spilling ink til the black words were lost in blackness.

“Someone pissed in your pease?” Gitur leaned across the long table. “You look all…consterned.” Her smile had something cattish about it — like an ornery tom half into doing something it oughtn’t to be, all for the daedriment of it.

Simra looked up, red and tired round the eyes, but cocking an eyebrow all the same. “‘Consterned’?”

“Yeah. Consternation and concern. Bit of both but not quite a full helping of neither. Good word, right?”

“One of yours?”

“Yeah!” Her smile broadened.

“Now doesn’t that make a change…”

Gitur popped a peeled hard-boiled egg into her mouth and chewed. Somehow her cheeks stayed grin-pinched all through the eating.

“Good word,” Simra agreed, even if only to surprise her — stop her smirking.

The Pin and Patches cornerclub was mostly quiet. The day-workers and dock-labourers had already come and gone, taking their breakfast early, and the Pale-Shods and hirelings that worked the night wouldn’t yet have risen. There was only the brawlish slap and throttle of the club’s cook knocking out dough for the day’s second round of bread. The occasional iron scrape and fire huff of her boy stoking up the oven once more.

Simra and Gitur had the long communal table near enough to themselves, just as the Pale-Shod clan had the Pin and Patches pretty much for their own. That meant Gitur was paying, and that meant breakfast was good. Simra had already eaten four fritters of fried fresh curds with a honey and strawberry preserve, two hard-boiled green-shelled eggs, and a cup of strong black smoke-tea. And still there was hot brown bread, and a dish of salty dripping donated gracious from Gitur’s rashers of bacon, and the promise of more tea to come.

“I’m fine,” Simra said after a moment. “Slept like shit, that’s all.”

“Yeah, reckoned as much. Anyone ever tell you ‘bout the noises you make?”

A flicker of horror crossed Simra’s face. “When I sleep?”

“Take that as a no..?” said Gitur, mock-sweet. “That’s probably for the best… Only, I can hear you all through the next room.”

Simra grunted. Lowered his eyes to the tabletop. Took a long drink of tea.

“So when’re you gonna talk to them?” Gitur carried on, changing tack. Her voice was sunny in the cornerclub’s shade but it darked Simra’s mood in an instant. “I mean…you probably oughtta…”

“Dunno. When’d you last talk to yours?”

“That’s different.” Gitur coloured. Her freckles blended faint into the dark flush of her cheeks. “Different as piss from pale ale and you know it.”

“Yeah?”

“Fuckin’ yeah. I know they’re busy and they know I’m the same, right? I see my ma and da when I can and know it ain’t a sign of nothin’ when we all know we can’t. That’s respect for you. Mutual fuckin’ trust.”

If that was true, Simra reckoned, Gitur’s parents had been trusting and respecting her since she was barely done being wetnursed. From then on she’d been fostered off to a tally of aunts and uncles and cousins, then given over into her own care. Self-styled heads of the Pale-Shod clan, her mother and father met with her monthly at best, and even that was all talk of numbers, territory, hirings and takings. She’d told him as much in her cups once, years back. Bitter on strongbeer and so angry Simra could all but feel the tears pricking at the edges of her eyes. She had brothers and sisters and half-siblings aplenty – a family that was dozens deep and wide – but all of them were orphaned by the love that Dargo and Jagerda Pale-Shod bore for their clan.

“Sorry,” Simra murmured. “Stupid of me. I’m just tired’s all…”

“Got no need for your sorries, Sim. Not like you said anything that meant shit.”

“…Difference is, busy or not, don’t reckon mine would want to see me.”

“And you’ll just – what? – sit an’ assume? Or you gonna find out? Listen, Sim… I know your mam by reputation and by what of her you’ve got in you. I reckon you both flew off, said things you didn’t mean. You do a good line in that, after all.”

More likely they each said things they meant all too well. Things that ought never to’ve been said, and that now they couldn’t unsay. That was Simra’s worry. A dark small dread of a voice, ticklish in the back of his skull.

“I’ll find out when I’m good and ready,” he said, weak.

“Yeah, well, days draw on. You’d better get ready soon or you’ll be gone without a word. Again.” Gitur rolled her eyes. “Y’know, Sim, for such a clever-clever pen-cunning word-wise little fucker, or whatever it is you reckon you are, you learn some things so fucking slow…”


	80. Chapter 80

_I’ve been reading. Taking tea and passing time. Things to still my mind and open doors within it. Peace and quiet. There are songs that spin singing round and round in my skull, like rondels that start over the moment they end. Or like the spell-mantra that Clovis taught me, back in Spring but forever ago. And by doing things – filling my head with whatever I can – I stop the singing._

_(But unsinging and songless are not the same thing. Guilt from the past and shame side by side. Times I was stupid or slow. Dread of the next grey to fall on me, knowing it’s only and always a matter of time. And dread of what’s to come. The things I have to do but’ve yet to find the strength for. The things I’m yet to do but’ve got no clue as to what comes after. And all this spending of money without earning any back. 31 copper pennies, 15 iron, 5 Imperial terci, 4 sesterci, with six black pennies and sixpence copper soon to be gone, good as tossed out to sea. The song itself remains and those are the refrains it turns on.)_

_‘Breathing Water, etc.’ is slow going. The way its prose riddles as you read frustrates more than it educates. At least in my case._

_It assumes knowledge. Years of education I don’t have and probably never shall, to grant a grounding for all the theory it deals out._

_It refers to books I can’t find copies of, for all my cursory searches through Senvalis’ shop, and the other two booksellers in the Quarter, and two other buyers and sellers of second-hand odds and third-hand ends. ‘The Spell as Vessel, or Will Over Rote.’ ‘Tarmalion’s Eight Equations, Wisely Expounded, with Gloss and Translation by Juron of Chorrol.’ ‘Discourse on the Disregarding of Tarmalion’s Equations as a Basis for Arcane Pedagogy Within the School of Alteration.’ Books and essays which’d probably weave a web just as tangled as this one and leave me twice the fool for gaining nothing from them and losing money for gaining them. So perhaps their scarcity’s for the best._

_In short the essays in ‘Breathing Water’ deal so little with the basics of Guild magic that they’re in the main no good to someone who doesn’t already have them mastered. I fare better with the vignettes that come between these essays. Little anecdotes and stories of magic used, magic gone awry. Illustrations. Some cautionary, others hopeful. For me, at least, they still warn and inspire enough that not even reading as dry as the whole rest of the book can parch out my hope to learn more. It’s just a matter of where to start._

_I also spent three pennies copper in my searches through the book- and scroll-shops of the Quarter on a short pressed-paper octavo book, maybe three gathers long. ‘Plays for the Longblade in One-and-a-Half Hands, by Cosmas Pasarian.’_

_Printed, and with scratchy-fine illustrations impressed from cut-plate, it’s more basic by far than ‘Breathing Water’. Written for the bored and bluster-filled children of merchants, to help them pose as Cyrod gentry by wearing swords outside of soldiery. Swords specifically for use in one or two hands with near equal convenience — hence, one-and-a-half hands on average. But remembering what Terez once told me about the Empire’s battlemages, and the kinds of swords they were once taught to use and given to wield – hand-and-a-half blades, hilted to protect the fingers – I wonder if this sort of swordwork might also be of as much use to me as to upjumped Heartland richlings with less sense than a basket of water._

_It teaches five plays, each split into illustrated steps. Pasarian reckons that, for each play, only the first step is necessary to overcome a poor swordsman. Each extra step from there is designed towards keeping pace with and besting better and better opponents._

_“If it be that your foeman’s blade be held out hip-high and point-extended, in such wise as would pierce you through the belly should you advance incautiously, there are two wise in which you may proceed. Both approaches are to be taken from an offender’s high-held guard._

_“The first is to strike in right hard, in such wise as shall beat the rigid edge of your blade against the flex-prone flat of your foeman’s, and in so doing be sure to strike it near his point, and from here, with your foeman’s blade thus beaten wide, you may turn your own blade to give an uprising cut, left to right against his belly, or thigh, or arm at the wrist or the joint or the shoulder, and in such wise by the line of your blade you shall in striking also protect yourself from the foeman’s final reply._

_“The second is simpler and shall see you bind the foeman’s blade at the tip with the strong of your own which lies nearest the hilt, for in so doing you shall have the advantage a man has in trying to bend a tree-branch close to its ending rather than its start – I speak, that is, of leverage – and from here push inward, with quillons tying your foeman’s blade and your point thrusting true into the trunk of his body._

_“And yet if your foeman be fast and strong and skilled in outstrip of your expectation, here he shall disengage from your beat, or else be so quick and far-eyed as to parry your uprising cut; or else if you gave him a bind and the intention of a thrust he shall disallow the latter by moving his blade’s strong to quell your advantage and push your blade on high as he feels the coming thrust._

_“If your foeman be so good as to follow these procedures…”_

_But there’s the first rub with Pasarian’s teaching. (That is, beyond the gabble of his prose that really needs its illustrations to be of any use.) Even when you view a fight as a thing made of crossroads, with more experienced fighters branching further and further from its beginning before someone gives ground, the view is still too ordered. What if your enemy doesn’t follow procedure? What if they do something different that, despite what any book might say, turns out to work in their favour?_

_As with magic, perhaps, rote will only carry you so far. And as with all other things, expectation and assumption – particularly as to what a person with a sword will try to do with it – are the mothers of all fuck-ups. I’ve fought enough to know that whatever teaching’s not graven into your muscles before a fight’s joined will fly off clear as dust in the breeze the moment your battle-blood’s up. And if there’s no teaching at all on the part of your opponent? Well then, they can’t be trusted to act as expected, can they?_

_The second rub’s based in my own limitations. Or rather, the limitations of the world around me. In the Pale-Shod warrens, and the Grey Quarter in general, there’s near nowhere with enough free space to swing a sword. That goes for practice – of which I’ve managed to get fuck-all save in terms of theory – and all the more so for fighting. This is knife-fighter’s territory, or else the land of alley-piece crossbows, cast metal knuckles, short-shaft coshes and cudgels. Use a sword any way but very specifically in tight close places like this, and it’s more liability than leeway._

_Note — Figure a better grasp on that specific way of fighting, or else know when to keep your sword sheathed and your knife ready, Simra._

_But in truth all this is delaying. I’m killing time so as not to hear it cry out. Three days I’ve got left in Windhelm, and I’m doing nothing to note it. Out of fear to admit it maybe. That I’m starting out into the world again. Leaving again._

_I’ve fucked it up twice. The third time I want to do it right. But that’s if this city will let me. If my family can bear me for the time it takes to say a goodbye. But that’ll show the difference between my ammu and I. We share a temper, true, but she holds grudges. Longer and harder than me, she holds grudges. Hurts herself to spite those that wrong her. She’s stubborn and patient and cold when need be. That’s the stuff her fury’s fanged with and I don’t doubt she’s still trapped in its teeth._

_And then there’s Gitur. It’s a week I’ve slept in her parlour, passed time with her, accepted her help. Some sad craven part of me reckons this whole week and these next few days are all one long goodbye. But if that’s true, it’s a farewell neither of us’re saying. And I wonder if she’s angry with me too. If she always has been, these last few years, and always in her own long-suffering silent way. I’ve got a wordless writhing shame in my gut that reckons she’d have cause._

_I want to get it right. Leave Windhelm the way I want to remember it. No matter what a shit-spiteful place your home might be, shouldn’t there always be something sweet to it, at least when looking back? Otherwise it’s no home at all — just the place you were born and the place you were raised. I want to find that thing before I move on. I’m running from it now. Carry on the way I am and I’ll find I’ve run so far and so long that I’m fleeing home again and not just travelling away._


	81. Chapter 81

The long slot of sky above the Grey Quarter was churning thick with clouds. Inside the gorge and on the Rigs, the air hung dank and heavy as wet wool. A close threat of late-summer rains that crawled like sweat between skin and clothes and made every noise sound sodden.

Chiming Row muttered, lower than usual. No wind to make the chimes tone out and mist to muffle the rest. Only the sway and creak of the Rigs themselves gave the clusters of bells and wooden tolls any cause to sound. The bustle of swineherds and cargo-carriers, and the cry of hawkers and beggars down below on the gulley floor was distant to hear and hazy for those who dared to look down. All the world flowed slow as honey, sluggard dull in the wet quilt heat.

Doing anything at all felt like interrupting something else, Simra reckoned. Still he’d made his way up the Rigs, taking the simplest oldest longest way, and fighting himself every step. The footway up was a crick-backed clamber of ramps that clung to the Quarter gorge’s rocky sides. It was the way carts took, with the wooden scaffolds whining beneath their wheels and weight. Urchins running basket-lifts shouted temptation from every crook in the path, selling a short ride up to anyone who could palm over a half-penny and stand the look at a long fall down. But he walked. And now he stood on Chiming Row, in front of his doorway.

His home. It was hard to think the word, but that meant all the more reason to think it hard. His home. This carved out splay of tunnels that burrowed hack-dirt into the black rock that long ago built Windhelm. Two curtains, a painted pattern on the floor, then home.

His mother sat on her woven rugs, between the first and second curtains. Should’ve known he’d find her here now. To all the world she was doing the work she did by day. Cross-legged in a sea of paper-scrap charms and curses, words for weal and healing woe, ointments and tinctures and braided cord oddments. Selling small wisdom, minor magic, hedge-witching for the health of the neighbourhood. To Simra she looked like she was guarding something. Waiting for him. Barring the way as she stared up at him from under the hoods of her eyes.

“You’ve been hiding.” She pursed her lips, disappointed. “Where, I wonder? Have you spent more of your hard-earned coin on a hammock in some cornerclub? Or found someone else who’ll take you in?”

Simra raised his brows. “Blessings on you too, Ammu,” he said in Dunmeris, shifting his weight uncertain between his feet.

“With that juldehk girl, hm? I wouldn’t doubt that she’d have you. Always a touch of honey in her eye, that one, whenever she looked at you.” She carried on in Skyrim’s Tamrielic, mocking him with it somehow, like she didn’t credit him to understand any other tongue. A knife-thin smile crept across her face as she watched something in Simra’s neck tighten. “So. Which is it?”

“Her name’s Gitur.” Simra’s voice was weak and small. Holding back venom took most of his effort. “Call her that or nothing.”

Ishar gave a wheeze of laughter. “Knew it. There’s no call, you know? No need to hussy yourself for a roof over your head.”

She was trying to provoke him. Poking and prodding til she found something that would make him snap — do something she could criticise. Crow over. Seethe and hiss over.

“Why’s that?” Simra asked, tight lips and half-clenched teeth. “Because I’m always welcome here?”

Something twitched at the corner of Ishar’s mouth. “Pal-khora pal-lassu,” she said eventually. “Come in.”

At last she’d switched to their mother-tongue, but only to speak to him like a guest. A stranger more than a son. Still, it was better than before. The blunt edge of her voice and the flash of her eyes as she asked him why he’d come back — he remembered the contrast all too clear. Simra tried not to let it briar at him. Get it right this time. Get it right. He’d take what love she could make herself give.

Ishar led him over the guest-glyph. It murmured with a simmering noise. Complained but didn’t object. Through one curtain and past the next in a rattle of beads they went, and on into the unlit inside of the warren where Simra had lived as a child.

His mother whispered a magelight into her hands. Repeating the spell three times, she set up a wisp of glimmering red in every reach of the warren’s main room. The light of her spells brought a deep gleam of colour into her blood-dark eyes. She didn’t sit down. Only stood side-on from Simra, head bowed and hair like flat straight drapes round her face as she stared intent at the unlit hearth. She was waiting.

“You always taught me a guest that means well ought to bring a gift,” Simra began, leaning against a rocky-hewn wall. “That’s the way with our people, right? I bless you and you bless me back, and I bring you something. As thanks for the guest-rights I know you’ll give me. Even if it’s just news, a story, a song. A pinch of spice for the pot you’re boiling, or an offer of fuel for your fire.” He shuffled off his boots and left them by the threshold. “So I reckon what I’m asking’s whether that’s what I am now? A guest?”

A voice came bitter from the back of his skull. Hadn’t he given her gifts enough? He remembered the many-sided rattle of silver strewn and rolling cross this floor. None of it was to be seen now. She’d squirrelled it away. The voice scathed him for the way he made himself speak. Low-grovelling and with careful tread, tip-toeing round this old woman like she was a wounded beast. But wasn’t that the issue? He was the one that wounded her.

“If that’s the way you’ll have me, I’ll take it,” Simra carried on as Ishar held her silence. But no sooner had he started than his own words waned down to a difficult nothing. Too careworn and careful to just let them come. “It’s not that I’m not angry,” he managed. “I am. With you and me and near enough everything, but right now mostly you. For all kinds of causes. For how you welcomed me back. For how you left before. For Raya. It’s not that I’m not angry, ‘cos I am. It’s just that the angrier I am – the more wronged and wrung-out and hurt I feel – the more I reckon I understand you. I don’t reckon I can blame you for being angry too.”

Ishar made a humming noise, somewhere in the red dark back of her throat. A nod and she turned halfway toward him. “Quite a pair, the two of us, hm?” That was her teaching voice. “Never happy with what we have and never at peace with what we’ve lost. We’ll not admit fault – not ever – but nor will we let go the guilt. I’d never have known your father if it were any other way. A man I’d leave my clan for, and lure away from his own. And me, away from the life I had picked out for me. Destiny stitched into me from well before I was ever myself. A life of honour and respect, lived for my people — those alive and those that came before. And it wasn’t enough. I met a guarherd of the Mabudani clan, and wanted more. I wanted him, and a life lived for myself…”

Neither she nor Sambidal had ever spoken the names of their clans to Simra before. Now he had one of the two. His father’s clan-name: Mabudani. It felt like crossing some border. Bittersweet. Like finding a truth by breaking open the mystery that once had hid it.

“That’s something of me in you, I think,” Ishar said.

“That and plenty more besides,” agreed Simra. She’d not answered him, nor forgiven him, and nor did Simra reckon she would. Not aloud. But she hadn’t lashed out or renewed their fighting. And maybe that wasn’t what he wanted, but it was more than he’d held out hope for.

“Part of me hates you,” she said, soft. “Whenever you’re out of sight, part of me hates you for not letting me protect you. And for making me forget myself with how scared I get for you. Nights when I get so—…and I can’t—…” She shook her head. The web-fine fall of her hair swayed and shifted. “I hate that we live in a world where I need to worry for you. But we do. And I can’t stop. No matter how stupid I know it is…”

Ishar turned. On her face was a weak cracked smile.

“Part of me wants you to come back,” she continued. “For everything to be the way it was and stay that way. Ever and always that way. But it can’t, can it? Between us, we broke it, you and I and her. The way things were. We broke it.”

Not Soraya, Simra wanted to say. Let her name alone. She escaped all this. He didn’t want to talk about her, so he breathed deep, waited til the spark of rage had faded, and left that line of talk untouched.

“I’m not coming back to try and make things the way they were,” he said. “It just…it wouldn’t work, would it? And I’m not asking your permission to come back and I’m not asking your forgiveness.” He couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t give it. “I’m asking permission to leave again. I’m just…trying to do right by you this time. That’s all. By you and Babu, right? I want – uhm – I want you to keep the coin. Even if it helps a little, help is help and it was always for you. What I did. To help. But now I…I want to do something for me. Like you did.”

Ishar gave a slow nod, like she too was holding something back. A deep breath, to pass the time it took to move along. When she spoke, her voice took on the weight of ritual. “Blessings on you, then. Sit by my fire, share my shelter. Let us drink from the same cup, you and I, and trade tales, that each might know and trust the other better.”

Something cracked in Simra. An opened uncomfortable warmth that pricked like thistle-prongs under his lungs and burnt like a blush in the bays of his eyes. A sore-pressed warning of tears. It was hard to hold them back, but he held them all the same.

“And on you,” he said.

Together they sat by the hearth. As his mother readied her kettle and crumbled in scrapings of tea, Simra coaxed a fire to life from the litter of peat that lined the pit. They drank and made ready for Sambidal to come home from the docks.

In its way, despite what they’d said, the work of it all was familiar. Something they’d done a thousand times, here by the ash of this hearth. Where she’d once taught him letters, and numbers, and magic, now they sat and spoke of what had been and was to come.

“What news of the world you’ve been walking?” Sambidal asked Simra, even as ever. He spoke like no time had passed. Like nothing had happened between the three of them. For his father, Simra reckoned, that was easiest. To feel only everyday feelings, and go on as he always had.

They ate stewed-and-steamed preshta-jan pork knuckle, with summer squash and longbeans cooked in the redware pot of sauce that had simmered the meat, and ash-baked beetroots and young waxy potatoes tossed with generous choppings of fresh green herbs. It was festival food, saved for Signing and Summoning days. This was neither, but still they ate it.

And as they ate, Simra told them where he’d been, what he’d done in the Rift, and the way he’d come home. A varnished coin-clipped version of the tale, but still the truth in all ways but in what he left out. Some things, like Soraya, were not for talking about. Not here and not with them. Not even now — perhaps especially.

After, they ate puffy oiled panbreads with sour snowberry and redcurrant jam, and Simra told them where he was going.

“Morrowind.”


	82. Chapter 82

_Two days til the Cedarsnake sails and the subject hangs hexing between us. It lives in every passing hour. Sours the constant trickle of time. Every moment is sand through the eye of a glass that I know will never run back. But somehow knowing only makes it harder to spend these moments well or wisely._

_Hard too not to think of all the time I pass as time that I’ve lost in the living of it. There’s no knowing how many hours I’ve got before my hours’re up and accounted for. And I can’t help thinking that I’ve already spent so many, and on what? Getting footsore, armsore, cut and bruised, chasing barely enough coin to keep from starving? Growing up quick as I could, only to find that I’ve willed and wished and rushed off my childhood. A phase of my life and all downriver now — last glimpse one instant, gone the next. And if anything’s ever sure to scare me, it’s knowing that, same as everyone, I am slowly running out of time._

_Summer’s coming to a slow glum close. And perhaps that’s the root of this melting mood. A changing dying time of year, or else a time ripe for changes._

_Am I selfish for grabbing some time to myself? I’ve been so much in company these last few weeks that I can feel myself fading from it._

_I walked along the gulleybottom and up Northslope under a fuming afternoon sun. Me and the whole great moving mingle of crowds all taking the same journey uptown. The counter-current of Dunmer wandering home from early work in Windhelm’s households and crafthouses. The solid occasional stillness of a Grey Quarter watcher in the crowd, in leather and harness and wielding their iron-tipped clubs. On and on, until I came to the long road’s ending. There it deltas out: an open muddy common that meanders off in splits and shares, and spends itself as alleys, sidestreets, two bigger branching roads._

_This is the Northslope market. Both a border and an overlap between worlds, it marks the end of the Grey Quarter and the start of Windhelm’s uptown. A straggly awkward shape, amorphous as a puddle. Edged with two-storey tableries and tap-houses, furriers and textile merchants. A counting house run ragged by how busy it always is with striking and storing and lending coin — no time to close means no time to clean, repaint or repair. Inside those boundaries are stalls and clapboard and canvas tent-shops, together selling the best and worst of both worlds. What floats to the top of the Grey Quarter, and what sinks to the bottom of Windhelm-proper._

_Purse-teasing and playing scout and bait for Soraya as a child, I know this market for a cutpurse or pickpocket’s dream. Crowded, disreputable, but bustling with the churn and change of currency. So my main purse, I kept close and held tight, and kept my hidden caches hid as I moved between the stalls._

_Strange maybe that I came here to get out of company, but in a crowd you forget even yourself. Past the noise, the motion and chaos, you’re faceless for it — nameless and alone, with room enough to breathe maybe, but not enough to think. That’s what I need sometimes. Today, that’s what I needed._

 

The mirror had cost him near enough two black iron pennies. The price of a good iron long-knife or sharp steel use-blade for a hand-sized piece of polished steel and a waxed suede bag to keep it in. Unhued and silvery and shaped like a longated diamond, it was pretty at least, and showed a clear untwisted picture. Worth the four coins he’d paid perhaps, or might be it was worth still more. That was a comforting thought. Reckoning he’d bartered for a better deal than most and made the red-cheeked bright-eyed Reachling tinker pay more dearly for losing it than Simra had in getting it for himself.

For himself? He’d meant it for Gitur. A gift to thank her. He’d been her guest when he needed shelter. She’d fed and helped him. Ghosts only knew why she took him in like that, and ghosts only knew what he’d done to deserve it. A gift was the least that custom required. A gift seemed only fair. But didn’t she have her big copper mirror, and didn’t its burnished warmth suit her? Red-gold brazen hair and freckles like flecks of claydust, as countless-many as stars in the open night sky…

Sitting with legs hung over the ledge, Simra sat under his willow tree, where it jutted from the city’s flank. From here both he and the willow overwatched the docks, the White River’s wide brown flow, and the darkening east as the sun moved towards evening. Summer had tressed the tree in green and its leaves draped round him, sounding in the wind. A whispering willow more than a weeping. Mirror in his hands, he angled it, and held it to show his face.

Knife-thin with high broad cheeks. A jaw that sharped to a point. Bottom lip full and top skinny as a starveling, and both scarred deep through on the left of his face, from the edge of a nostril to the start of his chin. Stark-bridged fine-bridged broken-bridged nose, twice-crooked from before he was even close to done being a child. His father’s eyes looking back at him, almond shaped, less like blood or ruby red and coloured more like firelit amber, heavy-lashed in dark dark grey and over-arched with slant-sharp brows. His long-grown wild-grown hair was black-dyed and still unfamiliar, wisping unruly into his face, tickling at the corners of his mouth.

His colours all were steel and cinders. Even if only in secret, under the soot-black dye, his hues matched the mirror and the mirror matched him.

“Shit…” he muttered under his breath. “You filthy fuckin’ backslider, Simra Hishkari…” But who had he given his word that the mirror had to be hers? Himself. Who had he betrayed here? “Only your own self.”

And hadn’t broken promises and betrayal always come easy to him? Lies and license and false-facing, and telling tales that were taller than the truth to them would ever have them be. It had won him his journal and a fair sum of coin to lie and traitor Torbjorn Shattershield. And though force of arms and honour in combat had held the Weeping-Cloud hall for Kitlun, it was Simra that won it first for her, armed with little more than lies, broken oaths, tarnished honour. He wondered if she’d remember that. Whether her clan would remember him, or hide his name for how it shamed them.

“Made y’r ammu a promise too,” he said to himself. “However long it takes. Months or years. Find an’ join an’ know, jus’ like y’were always meant to…right? ‘Promise me, Lonya. Promise you’ll try.’ How long ‘fore you let that slip too, hm? Wouldn’t be the first word you broke to her. Not by a long fuckin’ way…”

Kjeld too. He was remembering Kjeld. And Shora, and Shora’s words. ‘He didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have any other choice.’ ‘So in your story, why’d you make it like he made one? Chose to say and fight? All the others believe you, Simra. I don’t.’

He reached for the round-bellied clay bottle he’d nestled amongst the tree’s great grasp of roots. Lifted it to his lips and took a long gulp. Strongbeer, dark and bitter, tasting of near-burnt blackbread and the scent of thunderstorms. It was meant to be watered one-to-one but Simra told himself he liked its final tang: the alcohol that felt wide and hot on his gullet even after he’d forced it down. In truth he liked the mist it put into his mind. It got him drunk quick.

Squinting, Simra looked down at the beads and bracelet and the copper arm-ring that covered his wrists and wondered if any of them might do for a gift to Gitur instead…

“Tssht… Way you are – way you are with her – you bein’ gone might be gift enough.” Simra kissed his teeth and put the mirror back into its bag. He didn’t want to look at himself anymore. “Lucky to be rid of you…”


	83. Chapter 83

“Sim, it’s late.”

And yet there she was, all aglow with candlelight, sitting at a workstrewn table in her parlour. Ledgers and tablets of etched wood, birchpaper and scraps of parchment. Wisps of smoke drew streaks around her, fragrant to hide the sour scent of tallow. Blazing hair held back with a tassel-hemmed scarf, and dressed in a long pine-green overtunic, Gitur looked nowhere close to retiring for bed.

Simra stepped cautious a little closer and brushed past her protest. “Didn’t think you could read.” He nodded at the papers, the pen in her ink-stained hand.

“Numbers I can.” She wrinkled her nose. “S’only numbers, and they’re easy.”

He squinted down at her work. Figures upon figures. Next to some were scrawled a symbol or a quick and childlike picture: longship, oakleaf, tankard, anvil. Others were abstract but familiar all the same. Here, the crowsfoot rune that meant a penny. And there the same but struck horizontal through its central strut, once for an iron penny, twice for a silver shilling. And there, as often as anything, the dragonish zigzag that noted a copper Imperial drake: that smallest mote of money round which all Tamriel turned.

“Big numbers,” Simra observed. He knew accounting columns when he saw them. “Looks like you got a gift there for makin’ them behave…”

Gitur sighed. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how much of it we had to spend for any hope of making more. Investments, gettings, hiring and buying…” She looked up at him, rearranged her knees under the folds of her tunic, cocked an eyebrow. “You been drinking?”

“That obvious?”

“Mmhmm. Your words all lump together when you talk so it’s almost like you talk like people ‘stead of talking like a book… Somethin’ like that anyway.” She was eyeing him. He could see her thinking. Trying to figure him out again in a way that made his skin feel crawlish and wrong. “Where?”

“Out. About. Stopped home a bit, an’ I swear, not even my mam asked as many questions as you. ‘Where’ve you been? You been drinkin’? Who with? That milkskin girl?’ ‘No ammu, she’s off bein’ sensible, breadwinnin’ somewhere…’”

Gitur gave a snort that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Yeah, well. Glad you’re enjoying your hard-won life of luxury an’ leisure, Sim. Some of us’ve got shit to do still.”

“Yeah. Well…” Simra echoed. Tailed off into searching-eyed silence. He scanned Gitur’s parlour so as not to have to meet her gaze, afraid he’d see dismissal there — impatience or frustration. Around them was a shivering map of shadows, stretched strange like cave-paintings between pools of yellow candlelight. “Listen,” he tried, “I get plenty fucked off with interruptions an’ people breezin’ on into talkin’ to me when they can see I’m fuckin’ busy an’ I don’t wanna—… I mean, sorry, I can see you’re…” Simra gestured with a restless flap of his hand at her papers and numbers and symbols. “Right? S’just I’ve got scarce enough any time left before I’m gone an’ I wanted to let you know…”

Gitur’s face was cattish, curious but impassive. Stealing a glance back at her, part of Simra had hoped to find something there. Some sign of what she wanted him to say, because ghosts only knew the right words wouldn’t come easy. He didn’t know what he meant, or how he felt, let alone how to stitch all that mess together and make it solid, give it sense. That was what writing was for: making the storm inside him speak and understand itself. But instead he was talking, and with a tongue that still tasted sour with strongbeer.

“Let me know…what?” Gitur said. For a moment there was a glint in her eyes. A curve at the corners of her mouth that could be hope or a mockery waiting to be made. It scared the strength from him.

“I’ll let you know when I know. For now though, y’right. Course you’re right. It’s late. Shit. Sorry.”

But he didn’t go to bed.

 

_While I did scriv-work for Antolios, sometimes he’d have me over to his tent. There’d be pens, scrolls, wet inkstone, open ledgers to keep up the pretence that I was there to work. Sometimes he’d even have me open and read missives he’d got from commanders in the fyrds – reports he’d got from their scouts – and I’d read them to him. But usually there was drink. And Toli pulling the same grimace at every increasingly deep gulp. And mostly I think he was just glad of company._

_In his cups sometimes he’d talk at me. Explain things to me. Strategy and tactics, according to the great and grave old Imperial sources. Fundilius. Arctus. Volusian. I think he liked reminding himself that he knew these things, even fighting a war where none of it was any use. After all, a mercenary commander only has the freedom to think and choose for himself when there’s enough chaos around him that no-one higher up will think for him. And for some kinds of men, I reckon that’d be a blessing. For Antolios it chafed. So — especially fighting that sort of war. Like he liked help remembering he was fit for better things._

_For one thing, he told me the solid difference between the two. Between strategy and tactics. It comes down to a matter of scale. Tactics is what you and your warriors do on the battlefield, or in mid-skirmish. Tactics is how you fight. Strategy is everything that happens between engagements. Strategy is logistics, forage parties, equipment repairs, cartography, the healing tent. “Strategy,” he said, “is the organisation of everything but the obvious.” And it’s how battles are lost or won before they’re ever fought._

_Even as one fighter, not a leader, I reckon you can still think in those terms. How to fight, but also what fights to choose. How to stack the odds before blades are even drawn. Place and time and circumstance. But maybe you can draw even closer in, onto a smaller shorter scale. Once things come to steel and sweat, a single fight can be seen as a war. An exchange of blows is a battle, and within it, tactics is how you hold forth and how you fare. But strategy is choosing those exchanges — picking, inciting, refusing, provoking. And if your strategy is sound, one battle can win and end a war._

_But that’s if you’ve got the presence of mind, which, I reckon, most don’t. Ghosts know how little I think once my battle-blood’s up. But maybe part of strategy is knowing it’s probably much the same for your opponent. You don’t need to be clever. Only not so stupid as them._

_In any case — Antolios once slurred a piece of advice fair to use on both scales. In battle, in war, in fights great and small, but maybe in life too…_

_“If ever you can give something – or be seen to give something – without losing anything yourself, give it. Your friends and allies will love you for it. Your enemy will be taken in by it. Your friends will think you good where you are only practical. Your enemies will think you weak where you are strong; beaten where you are one step closer to victory.”_

_Turn his advice on its head maybe and you get another adage: if something’s being given, or something’s left alone, fuck your pride and take it. So — fuck him and fuck what he thinks and fuck what he’s up to now. But that doesn’t mean I won’t take his lessons where they’re given, just as I wouldn’t refuse his coin where it was owed. It just means I don’t have to be grateful for it. Or miss the Vahn or him._

 

“So this is…what? Some sorta ‘I’ll be gone and won’t be here to take care of you and I want you to be safe’ pigshit?”

Gitur’s eyebrows do something withering to him. A crooked frown. And in the gloom of her parlour she’s all glinting eyes. They throw back the candlelight, sharp at him through shade.

“You protect yourself,” Simra hears himself say. “Always have. You’re good at that.” The words are easy. He’s sober, trying to be sensitive, say the right thing. Even if it’s a lie. Gitur doesn’t protect herself. She makes other people protect her. Wields them like weapons; wears them like armour. “Fuck knows you never needed me for that, so nah, that’s not what I’m trying to say.”

She lies on her side, leant on one elbow in the pile of rag-stuffed sacks that Simra had called a bed these last few weeks. In his bed she’s posed and poised and waiting, like she always was when he came to her. Always that way. He’d come running and she’d stay still. He’d interrupt her. An unwelcome hitched stitch in the skein of her life.

But something softens in her face. A crease in the soft of her cheek, throwing a crescent of freckles dark into shadow. Is she remembering the same thing as him? By the docks, when the guards all but caught them mudlarking. The one time she had needed him, and it was almost more trouble than it had ever been worth. Or else it was a time he’d been one of her weapons — not the first, nor likely the last. But still she’s smiling.

“I just think it’s pretty,” Simra finishes.

Gitur picks up the crossbow like a dead bird one of her cats has brought her. Her fingers pinch around the tip of one steel arm and her nose wrinkles at the bridge. She eyes the ships-prow curl of its carven stock. “Pretty,” she agrees, “for something that’s for killing things with. Little birds and squirrels and rabbits. S’no alley-piece, is it, Sim?”

“So stick it on your mantelhearth. Or on your desk when you’re talking to fuckers you don’t like. Or, shit, get your black-market blacksmith friend over in Dugbellows to rework the arms. Point is it’s yours. As decorous or dangerous a tool as you want it to be.”

“Something to remind me of you then?”

“A dangerous tool..? Yeah.” Simra kisses his teeth. Grins. “S’me all over, right?”

He squints, thinking, idly eyeing the round of one bare calf. So little time in the sun, and still it was rife with freckles. Where’d they come from then? How did they find time to come in? He looked and somehow the guilt was only a background burn. Any other time, every glance would feel stolen. Guilt in noting the fall of her hair. Guilt in seeing the crease of her cheek when she smiled or smirked or grinned. Like he ought to ask permission for everything he saw. Not now. Not today. Not today.

“Sim?” she asks. “Where is it you got it anyway?”

He feels the answer. And of a sudden he’s blind. Bone that parts and turns weak under the slam and slam of his sword’s pommel. When he sees, it’s not Gitur, not the parlour. Just the boy’s face pale with battle-blood, frozen stark in a look of dumb surprise. One startle-choked scream. His braided hair wet and matted with a thick flow of blood and the soft grey detail of worse things, spilt from him. His frozen face, young, proud, all this too quick for fear. He knows the other’s name, but this boy takes his own like a secret to Sovngaarde or the Void, or Sovngaarde, or the Void, or the Void, the Void…

“Where’s it you got it?” His mother’s voice. “The where doesn’t matter.” Soraya now. “It’s how. It’s always how.” She speaks through a sharp-cornered smile.

Simra jerked awake. Like falling and trying to catch himself, he came to. Head full of ringing aching bells. Mouth filled with the taste of sawdust, rancid fat, sour yellow regret. He pawed at his face with a shudderish hand. Under his fingertips, the table’s woodgrain was pressed into his forehead from where he’d slept, facedown, surrounded by bags and belongings.

“Shit…” he groaned.

The same hand hovered in front of his eyes. Finger and thumb, palm and heel, the calloused skin was ink-dyed black. On the taproom table his journal was open. Erratic scrawl crammed one corner of the page. And the previous one, and the one before. Next to it, a dried-up well of ink lay beside the dregs of a near-drained tankard. Simra leaned in. Sniffed tentative at it. The smell was of something stronger and more sullen than beer.

He’d written all night, drunk all the while. He’d written and written. Memories and musings and flashes of stupid anger, before he’d even started the letter. Coming last, the letter was the crookedest part of the night’s writing.

Gitur I’m not brave I’m not and that’s why I’m here and half-drowned in vodka and with only ink to say what I’m saying and in truth I don’t know where to start or how I’ll finish but there’s things I know I need to say and the first of them is thank you

“Shit…”

The journal slammed shut.

Everything hurt. His eel-writhing stomach and table-bruised chest and the awkward bend of his left shoulder and elbow. His head, skull splitting, like a wedge was being mallet-driven into it, opening the bone inch by inch, wide and wide and wide at the back of it. A liquid press behind his eyes, and a trail of sick uncertainty, long-drawn down his throat.

Around him the dockside taproom slept. Cold pats of yellow-bone tallow pooled where last night’s candles had burnt. Two long tables in a deep-dug cellar, ceiling dark and greasy with a thousand nights of smoke. A wall of side-stacked barrels and casks. A hoggish-fat Nord lay death-deep in sleep under one tapped barrel, a slow drip of yellow ale spat-and-spatting his whiskered ruddy face. By the snores and the smell of unwashed flesh, he and Simra weren’t the only ones to have slept here. Simra was only the first to wake, slouched at the taproom’s far end.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye-sockets, then knuckled his eyelids hard. His skin felt grim and waxen. His hair felt lank as the soiled reeds on the floor. He peered over at the fat beer-spattered Nord. Leatherpatch apron and well-practised position beneath the barrels, Simra reckoned him for the owner. No telling if he’d paid the man for his drinks or not, nor any matter now. No time maybe. No time.

“Shit.” Simra lurched clumsy from the bench he’d slept on and crammed his journal into his satchel. Mustered up his things. “Shit shit shit.” Rush down between the tables. On toward the exit. “I fucking swear, I go out there and see daybreak I’ll—…Shit. Ghosts and bones and dust and blight fucking shit..!”

He shot the bolt that had locked the taproom shut for the night. Outside a yolk-yellow sunrise smirked at him over the mountains and danced fire-bright on the river’s brown water.


	84. Chapter 84

Through the wakening throng of the docks. The peal and toll of bells that, bright as new shillings, sounded silver through the morning. The blast of calling horns that split the din. Past a mess of merchant’s buyers, bidding on boxes of ghosts-knew-what. Past a pair of Argonian dockworkers, each stripped to the waist and struggling at either end of a long pinewood box, hissing and clucking in their native tongue. 

Through the forest of broider-stitched felt, and soft-cured hides, and rope moored yurts that made up the Morayat. The scents of frying mutton and roasting fish, smoking peat and hot stone. The call of a mer selling oysters and snails, and another trying to outshout him as she hawked her catch of shrimp. Ashlanders, Simra thought, but Ashlanders more of the Morayat than Morrowind. They’d been away too long.

Bags and packs jogged against his sides. The long and cloth-wrapped shape of his sword, worn covert as he could, slapped against his back, like whipping speed from the flanks of a horse. A stitch panged between his ribs. The sun rose and then was risen. The day had dawned in clouds of dust and a windless close of air.

“Cool sweet water!” In the Quarter gorge, a Dunmer woman called out from her stall. “Cool sweet water from the shade beneath the city!” Water-sellers were as sure a sign as any that the day was set to be hot and dry — a final flare from the dying Summer. By magic or guesswork, somehow they always knew. “Cool sweet water to slake you!”

Simra heard her words as a sour warning. He was thirsty past the point of feeling it in his throat. It had joined the ache in his head. It cloyed like hunger, and worse than hunger, below the pit of his belly. He grimaced. The taste of his mouth was wrong and his tongue was tough as wood.

He’d stopped running and started to walk. No time to idle or let up his pace but he walked all the same, through the high narrow pass of the Grey Quarter’s gulley floor. He struggled just far enough to get the water-seller from earshot then slouched into a deep patch of shade and came to a stop. With his back to the rough stone wall, Simra bent down double. Panted so hard and cold it hurt his teeth. The need to vomit rose and retreated, rose and retreated, a throbbing in his dust-dry throat.

“Think,” he rasped.

The Cedarsnake was due to sail at morning’s height, when the sea’s tides were best matched to the White River’s current. How long he had was hard to tell but trickling by all the same. Harder still to know if it was long enough to find his way into the Pale-Shods’ underway.

“Try to think.”

Runnels of sweat gathered between his brows, grew together, then dripped heavy from his forehead. More hung rank in his hair. Disgusting. He’d always found something foul in breaking a sweat.

“…think.”

Thirst and revulsion, exhaustion and the weight of his bags, and the grim background noise of his hangover. Lank hair and blown cheeks and bleary sweat-stung eyes. She wouldn’t want to see him like this, even if he could find her. Who would?

“You fucked it,” Simra hissed to himself. “Since you left last night you fucked it up. Stayed up all night, drunk and writing, and for what? Find the right words, did you? Crowshit…”

Nothing came. Not then or now. Nothing to say that might undo the frayed hems of what was already unravelling. Might as well unpick it. Save the thread and keep the rags and start anew again. Like the shudder of water beginning to boil, his thoughts came unclear. A single shard of laughter broke past Simra’s teeth and shook his double-bent back. Scalding-hot thoughts pushed him out of his head. It was easier to fall. Back into whatever waited under them. An anger impossible to tell from panic, or a panic bright-blazing as anger. It was easier to fall.

When he woke into his own body again it was back to the sound of bells. To nauseous knots tied up in his belly and a skull that felt ripe to split. Simra looked down at his unsteady hands. The knuckles of his right were starting to throb. They gleamed new-bloody, all broken skin and a few stony flecks of grit, and no memory how it had got that way. Simra curled his lip. At least with the docks around him again the choice had been made for him.

A double hornblast crooned out across the rivermouth. He flinched before he remembered its meaning. One blast for calling crew and two to muster passengers. Simra drew in a shaken breath. Let it go. Walked towards the sound.

Whatever he’d done or been before, the future stayed the same, he thought. All the same promise and all the same dread. All the beck of going back to a home he’d never known except through the pages of books. There ought to have been some comfort in it. Some warm feeling or flicker of hope. Instead, when he found the ship, there was only the cold thanks of a reprieve.

The Cedarsnake was a skinny sea-and-river ship, low at the sides and shallow in its draw, but built up at fore and aft into a cargo locker and small slant-roofed cabin. Its full length ran maybe thirty paces. Ten rowing benches squat at midship beneath a raised half-deck, and two masts stood up from the hull, each with a diagonal junk-slatted sail furled against it. Borrowing between Nordic longships and what might’ve been Morrowind designs, Simra reckoned it was an appropriate kind of mongrel for the main journey it made. Black and gleaming with new pitch and sleek with the shine of water, it waited, yawing in the river at the shift of cargo and crew.

Under Simra’s feet the jetty bobbed alike, uneasy with the changing tide. Above sobbed gulls and seabirds, shrike-sounding with hunger. He stepped onto the gangplank and boarded the Cedarsnake — his first and last steps toward Morrowind.

He stashed every bag but his satchel in silence. Unstrapped all bulk but his swordbelt, which he unwrapped and buckled aslant his hip. No more than a nod as Nurama greeted him by his false name and came near to advise him on what should go where. Somehow awkward and somehow easy, things had turned sleepwalk-slow and sleepwalk-certain. But wasn’t that part of the way with going by water? So much of the travelling was travelled for you and all the rest was waiting.

After, Simra slouched down onto the half-deck and sat with his back to the ship’s left rail. Some part of him didn’t want to see. Dreaded it, even — Windhelm shrinking off in their wake. Like watching dozens on dozens of possibilities start to die then dwindle to nothing in the distance.

“Cast off!” A haul and rushing in of ropes and gangplanks. “All hands to oars!” The mixed gather of crew took to their benches, Nords beside Dunmer next to Cyrods, Bretics, and one amber-skinned Altmer, twenty strong in total. “Oars out! Left bank make ready to fend off, and…fend! Fend now, the tide won’t wait til you’re good and ready, fend off now and to water!”

The captain was a creak-voiced Dunmer, hair flashing steel-grey under an embroidered leather cap. As they took position at the tiller, the ship guided itself out into the river’s main flow.

At the bow, a Nord woman with thin brown hair blew three times more on the ship’s horn.

“A hard score of strokes, oarswain. Then a steady pace, if you please!”

The captain called their orders to the Nord woman and she beat them out on a brass cymbal to give the rowers their pace. By clash, ring, and clang, the Cedarsnake rode into the rivermouth.

Simra tried not to look, but feeling the ship move was enough. His stomach curled for the swim of the deck beneath him, and writhed round the failings and drink he’d fed it. He nursed the grinding pain of his right fist, holding it in the fingers of his left. At least the cuts to his knuckles might help him look the part of who he was pretending to be — just one last dockside taproom brawl for Katharas Ruvaen before he bid Windhelm farewell.

Two hours passed in pain and cold sick crawling skin. The Cedarsnake drew in its twenty oars and opened out its sails: two dragonfly-wing diagonals that filled with wind and beneath them showed Simra his first glimpse of open sea. A yawning nothing, golden where the sun struck bright, and shading elsewhere through silver to pewter to drab bruised grey. A sky wide as the one that hung over the Rift and wider still ahead.

He’d wanted there to be some wonder in it. Another time maybe there might have been, but here he scarce deserved it. Like he’d not deserved the right words or deeds to say or do what he needed to. Not with Gitur and not with Shora, or any time else that he’d tried. Where had trying to be good ever got him but back to the bad place he’d started? And maybe it was always bound to be that way.

There was an awful freedom in that. Thinking it til it felt like something he knew and always had known. Burn bridges and he’d never have to brave the crossing. Cut ties, run and run, and he’d have not a soul to face but himself. You are what you are, Simra reckoned, fuck-up and liar and coward and more, and can’t ever be more or less. There was a relief in that. A rising sinking sweet-guilty thing. Like a touch of destiny, same as might have got into his mouth and made sure the last word he spoke to her was the right one:

‘Sorry.’

Simra coughed up another dry piece of laughter. Like making a joke of it might take out the sting. And as the ship tacked a slow swing eastward, he clambered to his feet, crossed the deck, and looked from the rail along the coast. Beaches of stone and shattered slate. Cliffs of black Eastmarch stone. Grey mountains and a misty line of horizon. The edge of things. It didn’t blink out or drop off out of sight. Far-flung and looking forward, it only faded away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part Two ends here.
> 
> Between parts two and three there will be an intermission, told from a different perspective.
> 
> Thank you for reading and enjoying my work.


End file.
